An interesting perspective on an unfamiliar world. Tales that are well crafted but ultimately rather repetitive.
Twelve pieces, a combination of fiction and nonfiction, describe life among Native Americans who have left the reservations and entered mainstream society.
Power (the novel Grass Dancer, 1994), a Sioux who grew up in Chicago and studied at Harvard, writes pretty closely of her own experience, to such an extent that her pieces seem as much a set of variations on a theme as a collection of separate tales. The narrators are mostly young women of Sioux/Dakota origin living in urban centers far removed (both spiritually and geographically) from the reservations and tribal homelands of their ancestors. The title story, for example, describes the unhappy domestic life of a Sioux family in Chicago: Told by a girl, it portrays the quiet trauma when an Indian-rights organizer leaves his wife and family and returns to the reservation—ostensibly to do political work, but in reality to seek a new life with his girlfriend. Some stories examine the tensions of mixed marriages. “Watermelon Seeds” is an account of a Mexican-American girl from Chicago who becomes pregnant by a Chippewa from Wisconsin, while “The Attic” sorts through the family histories of a half-Sioux, half–Irish-American girl who finds some resonance in the history of persecution among her ancestors on both sides of her family. “Angry Fish” is an excursion into magic-realism, introducing us to Mitchell Black Deer, a Sioux in Chicago who becomes friendly with a talking statue of St. Jude. Other pieces concern the relation between past and present: The narrator of “First Fruits” (a Harvard freshman, a Sioux) becomes so intrigued by the story of the first Indian to graduate from the college (in 1655) that she begins to see him on campus, while the young narrator of “Museum Indians” visits the Natural History Museum in Chicago to see the Indian dress donated by her Dakota grandmother.
An interesting perspective on an unfamiliar world. Tales that are well crafted but ultimately rather repetitive.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-57131-039-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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
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
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