A moving story of a daughter seeking to understand her mother’s choices.
A memoir of immigration, divorce, and gender roles in modern Greece.
Kouidou-Giles, a Greek immigrant to the United States and child welfare professional, tells her story as a daughter trying to uncover certain truths about her past in 2015—and finding out much more than she expected. The book is dedicated to the author’s mother, Eleni; in the book, she’s called Nitsa, and is shown as rebelling against her society’s expectations of a good wife in order to save herself. The story is told mainly in flashbacks, partially interspersed with chronicles of flights between Athens and Seattle as the author read through decades-old court records of her parents’ divorce. The narrative begins in earnest with the author’s effort to find her mother’s grave in Thessaloniki, Greece, and becomes much deeper; it’s primarily a story of family dysfunction, divorce, and seeming abandonment in patriarchal mid-20th-century Greece. The author is meticulous in describing the social context of a time and place where no-fault divorce didn’t exist, and couples were required to stay together for 10 years before divorce proceedings could even begin. The result is a painfully honest portrayal of how the system could bring needless ugliness to divorce proceedings that left lasting pain and confusion for children caught in the middle. Kouidou-Giles also critiques past gender expectations, while making all the women in the story, including Nitsa’s mother-in-law, YiaYia (Grandma) Sophia, feel real. The book additionally offers a rich presentation of the cultural and legal background of this story of a Greek family, highlighting the contrast between ideals and expectations and messy reality; in particular, the author found that things weren’t what they seemed in the marital breakup. Although the narrative is somewhat slow at first, readers, like the author, eventually come to a greater understanding of all the people involved.
A moving story of a daughter seeking to understand her mother’s choices.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64742-171-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Assorted tales and contemplations that inspire as often as they entertain.
A Tennessee judge reflects on family life and braves dystopian futures in a collection that blends memoir and speculative fiction.
Swann, the author of Politics, Faith, Love(2017), divides his book into three distinct parts. The first is a series of what-if scenarios; Bill Kirksey, the author’s alter ego, wakes up on different mornings to a staggering loss—on one morning, he’s lost his sense of hearing; on another, there’s no electricity. In each story, the losses affect everyone in the world, and Kirksey, his wife, and their grown children must adjust to the new normal in Gatlinburg. The most imaginative tale of the bunch, in which people pick up teleportation skills, is disappointingly brief. The book’s second section centers primarily on Kirksey’s past and particularly his home life. These warm, charming stories include one in which he learns that his mother’s preference for dark chicken meat and gizzards was only because she knew her other family members liked the other parts of the bird better. The final, nonfictional section, which takes up more than half the book, collects a hodgepodge of first-person musings, poetry, and tales of Swann’s days on the judicial bench. In this part, the author sometimes relies too heavily on secondary material, such as identical biblical verses in different translations and lengthy court documents. Nevertheless, the author’s prose style is buoyant and memorable: “He could remember how the power line outside his fifth-grade window had stacked up with snow, right on the wire, an ever-mounting knife-edge of snow, thin as the wire itself.” Although he delivers his life stories with fond nostalgia, he’s also occasionally playful; one piece, for instance, is essentially a list of words and phrases in East Tennessee dialect, which he helpfully translates. Overall, the book is endlessly upbeat, spotlighting a “pretty decent” depiction of humankind as well as Swann’s steadfast positivity.
Assorted tales and contemplations that inspire as often as they entertain.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982261-69-6
Page Count: 210
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A short and often intriguing writing sampler from a Midwestern writer.
A debut collection spans a lifetime’s worth of poems, stories, and essays.
It takes a talented writer to maintain a consistent voice in a range of different forms, and Hurley does just that in this assortment of fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, collected over the course of a long but sporadic writing career. The short story “The Broken Day of Bernie McCarville,” set in 1915, tells the tale of two men—an Iowa farmer haunted by his dead father and an itinerant coal shoveler who’s heading home to bury his sister—on a deadly collision course. Another, “The Second Drawer Revolver,” follows an opinionated 14-year-old, home alone for the first time, who’s forced to contend with a burglar. A series of vignettes, called “Encounters,” describes prominent figures that Hurley met during his life, including jazz legend Louis Armstrong, comedian Jonathan Winters, and even members of the British royal family. The poems address a number of topics, although aging, loss, grief, and death are recurring themes, as in “An Old Friend Dies”: “I am a hoarder of life, / a rejecter of strife. / When a friend-treasure dies, / denials of fact will arise.” Hurley’s animated language often holds readers close: “I have to warn you right away,” begins the aforementioned burglar story, which was published in a literary magazine in 1958. “I talk a lot—even for fourteen. My grandma says I must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle.” The poetry feels somewhat more antiquated, with its sometimes-inelegant meters and rhymes, but it’s nonetheless surprising, as in “Two Slow Murders”: “The neighbor’s dog was killed last week. / A gray coyote snuck and slammed, / An act for which it’s closely diagrammed. / We heard both dog and old man shriek.” The best piece is an essay about seeing Robert Frost speak at Loras College when Hurley was a student there, in part because it explains so much of his own aesthetic. Overall, the author successfully manages to put his many talents on display.
A short and often intriguing writing sampler from a Midwestern writer.Pub Date: June 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-66417-644-7
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Xlibris US
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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