Imaginative and competently written, the stories deliver a well-developed sermon for the Christian reader.
In this collection of inspirational short stories, ordinary people and one extraordinary flock of ducks search for peace of mind in rural America and the Swiss Alps.
The titular tale features a duck named Johannsen guiding his flock south during hunting season as he meditates on love, beauty and the meaning of life. Ratliff’s ducks seem ridiculous until they earn their wings, in this case through a dramatic showdown with a Labrador retriever. The rest of the collection features human characters. “High-Level Love” is a chaste story in which an unrequited love leaves a romantic ideal untested as a small-town reporter’s friendships with the patrons at a local diner help him uncover the town librarian’s secret passion, which leads him to writing the best piece of his career. “December Encounter” and “An Alpine Happening” echo the folk wisdom of Chicken Soup for the Soul as two families of ailing children pray for a miracle. A religious work, the book’s plot and characters are secondary to the spiritual message, which We Fly at Dawn delivers in brief chapters enhanced with illustrations, photographs and poetry that help keep the pace. Ratcliff’s characters are humble people with surprisingly lofty thoughts—they even express their philosophical unrest in verse. As a mysterious old man explains in “December Encounter,” “Poetry…is the mirror of the soul, and it is your soul and its association with the infinite intelligence of the universe that will make or break your happiness.” This soul-searching forms the arc that ultimately leads to an affirmation of Christian faith. In “Sunday-Morning Christmas” a preacher quotes the books of John, Romans and Revelations to convert Billy Joe; a sawmill worker, husband and father who feels an emptiness he can’t explain. In a suspenseful but heavy-handed conclusion, Billy Joe comes home from work to discover that his family is missing and learns the true meaning of Christmas.
Imaginative and competently written, the stories deliver a well-developed sermon for the Christian reader.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-1441551535
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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