An uneven collection from a writer who shows promise.
Five suburban step-families fall apart and reconnect in ten linked stories.
Pencil and paper ready? Here goes: Lu married Ward after Beatrix divorced him to marry Alan, who divorced Roxie to tie the knot. Moira married Ben after divorcing Tate, who now dates Roxie (see above). Tate’s sister Glynn, Moira’s ex-sister-in-law, married George. And then there are the kids: Liv, Alan and Roxie’s truculent, too-thin teenage daughter; Ward and Beatrix’s three sons: Devin, who refuses to speak in the presence of either parent, Britt, master of sarcasm, and Ollie, who cries; Ryan, Moira and Tate’s OCD handful, and Ashleigh, their 15-year-old sexpot (she dates Devin; see above); and Joey, Glynn’s son, who has more in common with Glynn’s new husband—especially a love of “Mortal Kombat” video games—than with her. Everyone lives nearby, in Oak Park, Ill. In the first three stories, “Loopy,” “Restoration” and “Ballad of the Barbie Feet,” YA novelist Ruby (Good Girls, Sept. 2006, etc.) begins to develop her many characters by moving a peripheral player from one story to the center in the next, and so on in the third. This deft technique deepens the stories’ competing personalities by letting the reader weigh the characters’ opinions about each other. Unfortunately, this daisy chain of narrative revelation breaks with the gimmicky fourth story, “Dear Psycho,” the collection’s weakest link. The remaining six stories, hampered by too many character sketches standing in for characters, are hit-or-miss: “Picture of Health” stretches so far out on one family tree’s limb—it introduces the girlfriend of a dead cousin—that its relevance to the whole fails to register. “Hug Machine” undermines Lu, otherwise the most appealing character of the lot. Only the title story, “I’m Not Julia Roberts,” in which a current and a former wife attempt to have an impossible conversation (think of the movie Stepmom), returns to the same storytelling élan of the opening three.
An uneven collection from a writer who shows promise.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2007
ISBN: 0-446-57874-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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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