A record of an author finding her voice.
Debut collection from the award-winning author of A Map of Home (2008).
“The Lunatics’ Eclipse” is a fable about a girl who wants the moon and a boy who builds a rocket. “How Can I Be of Use to You?” is a sly interrogation of the ways in which women are exploited, particularly by each other. “Lost in Freakin’ Yonkers” is a desperate, foulmouthed rant by a young Egyptian-American woman pregnant with a drunk loser’s baby. These stories are set in locations geographically as disparate as Cairo and Paramus, New Jersey. “A Sailor” is a carefully controlled exercise in very short fiction, while “Grace” is a weird tale that gets a bit Borges-ian toward the end. Many of the stories gathered here have been published already—some more than once—in a range of literary journals, including such prestigious outlets as Ploughshares and Guernica. This variety is impressive, but it doesn’t necessarily make for a satisfying reading experience. Taken as a whole, these stories feel like a series of experiments—or assignments—consistent only insofar as they share a certain superficiality. Jarrar lived in Kuwait and Egypt before moving to the U.S. as a teenager, and much of her work turns on a clash of cultures. Unfortunately, in most instances, this dynamic dichotomy is the whole story. An author is not obligated to resolve the conflicts she sets up, but Jarrar seldom sticks around long enough to explore the results of the conditions she creates. In this regard, most of these stories seem unfinished. “Building Girls” is an exception. This is a subtle interrogation of class spanning multiple generations and an exploration of desire enlivened by a dash of magical realism.
A record of an author finding her voice.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-941-41131-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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