A series of gossipy conversations with some engaging descriptions, but its uneven prose may fail to engage readers.
Mera offers a debut collection of stories that highlight social issues in the fictional small town of Little River.
The author tightly intertwines the threads uniting a community over the course of 17 tales, told from diverse viewpoints. In stories shared verbally between characters, readers meet various townspeople, including Judy, a woman sent to a foster family as a child slave when she was 10; Terence Pierre, a woman forced to marry Maximilian Makir, the father of her unborn child; and Ronald Jean-Philip, a father trying to save his teenage son from a prison sentence. Mera uses these characters to address real-life challenges of the developing world, such as poor health, lack of sanitation services, child abandonment, and the legacy of slavery. Mystical and spiritual elements abound, as when a preacher walks through town asking each downtrodden resident about his or her favorite miracle from the Bible, then provides solutions to their problems; in other tales, residents are turned into zombies by voodoo priests and a midwife is beaten after being deemed a sorceress. Throughout, characters reveal long-kept secrets, such as a sexual assault, the existence of a secret son, and the abduction of an infant twin. Family trees grown thornier with each character’s confession; in one instance, a couple must be stopped from marrying because they’re revealed to be half siblings. Mera provides vivid details of life in Little River in several passages: “almost everybody was awake by six a.m.—The bread men, the children selling ground coffee, the ladies with their baskets of vegetables, fruits, and all kinds of goods…at six p.m., you would hear the voodoo drumbeats.” Sections on child slavery provide frank descriptions of mistreatment. But there’s often more telling than showing in this collection, with some vague descriptions, such as “the family was in a rage.” Characters also often summarize their lives in long blocks of dialogue, with little action taking place in the present moment.
A series of gossipy conversations with some engaging descriptions, but its uneven prose may fail to engage readers.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5434-8375-8
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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