This book is weakened by lack of a driving narrative and details that would bring the main character into clearer focus.
A 15-year-old girl runs away from an abusive home to find refuge and new worlds among the varied populations of Los Angeles.
The first pages of this hybrid novel/story collection by Latiolais (Widow, 2011) tell us immediately where we are: in the realm of poetic, gestural, and not always informative writing. The first paragraph relates that the unnamed narrator was home-schooled and “learning to add had been learning to collect any denomination of coin or bill until she'd had enough to buy this one bus ticket”—which suggests a fairly hardscrabble life and not very good home schooling. But on the next page, in a tallying of the resources she has to survive, the narrator thinks of the “addition and subtraction, fractions and the rudimentary algebra she had loved.” So home schooling had been more rigorous than was first suggested, and her math skills go beyond figuring out the price of a bus ticket. Small discrepancies like these keep us from feeling we really understand the girl's background, though other details are well-chosen, such as her love of sugar and her plump figure. There is something appealing about this courageous young girl who escapes a brutal father, but her path is unrealistically smooth, and we don't get to see her coping with adversity. That she is a naif with old-fashioned diction is believable, since she was raised by conservative Christians, but the number of people she meets who take an interest in her is not. From the first man she gets a ride from to a kindly gallery owner to an even kindlier old man, the girl is taken care of in a way that doesn't seem believable for teen runaways today. Undercutting the persuasiveness of this narrative still further are the stories that punctuate it—a strange choice for a book, making it neither novel nor story collection—because the characters in the stories seem more alive than the shadowy “she.” By the end, Latiolais has sketched a broad tapestry of LA characters, which was presumably the point of the book, but it asks a lot of the reader to stay with the shifts in narrators and even genres in this slim volume.
This book is weakened by lack of a driving narrative and details that would bring the main character into clearer focus.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-28505-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
