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
A seamless melding of Japanese cultural nuances with universal themes—in a virtuoso story collection from rising literary star Murakami (A Wild Sheep Chase, 1989; Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, 1991). These 15 pieces, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and Playboy, are narrated by different characters who nonetheless share similar sensibilities and attitudes. At home within their own urban culture, they happily pick and choose from Western cultural artifacts as varied as Mozart tapes, spaghetti dinners, and Ralph Lauren polo shirts in a terrain not so much surreal as subtly out of kilter, and haunted by the big questions of death, courage, and love. In the title story, the narrator—who does p.r. for a kitchen-appliance maker and who feels that "things around [him] have lost their balance," that a "pragmatic approach" helps avoid complicated problems—is troubled by the inexplicable disappearance of a local elephant and his keeper. In another notable story, "Sleep," a young mother, unable to sleep, begins to question not only her marriage and her affection for her child, but death itself, which may mean "being eternally awake and staring into darkness." Stories like "TV People," in which a man's apartment is taken over by TV characters who "look as if they were reduced by photocopy, everything mechanically calibrated"; "Barn Burning," in which a man confesses to burning barns (it helps him keep his sense of moral balance); and "The Second Bakery Attack," in which a young married couple rob a McDonald's of 30 Big Macs in order to exorcise the sense of a "weird presence" in their lives—all exemplify Murakami's sense of the fragility of the ordinary world. Remarkable evocations of a postmodernist world, superficially indifferent but transformed by Murakami's talent into a place suffused with a yearning for meaning.
Pub Date: March 31, 1993
ISBN: 0679750533
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Warm, generous stories.
A kind and earnest debut collection of connected stories set in blue-collar northeastern Pennsylvania.
MK and Colleen, former classmates at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Elementary School, reconnect as middle-aged women, both working retail jobs in a mall that’s just months away from closing its doors. From the outside, they seem to live just on the edge of despair and economic ruin, except both have too much moxie. In "St. Christopher on Pluto," for example, Colleen entangles MK in a plot to ditch Colleen's car by the Susquehanna River for insurance money. While MK lectures Colleen on committing fraud, Colleen wisecracks and tells MK to lighten up. That's the setup of many of McKinley's stories: Bighearted, redheaded Colleen has a scheme (or a volunteer gig), and she wheedles practical MK, often the narrator, into coming along. These slice-of-life stories touch upon social issues on the verge of fracturing already economically stressed, conservative communities: immigration, America's never-ending post–9/11 wars, the HIV epidemic, drug addiction, and the disappearance of good blue-collar jobs. In "Complicado," Colleen volunteers to photograph an ESL class graduation, but it turns out the women don't want their pictures taken for fear of becoming the target of a rising tide of jingoism. Once she understands, Colleen yanks the film from her camera, and the party ends with the church organist's offering her accordion to a young Mexican man, "the Latin sounds creat[ing] fusion in a room steeped with polka fests." While we yearn for such happy endings in life, they can seem a bit treacly in fiction. When McKinley resists the lure of “Kumbayah” moments, she delivers emotionally devastating stories about how places with bleak economic futures hurt good, ordinary people—as well as how such people quietly craft lives full of intangible bounty.
Warm, generous stories.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-949199-26-0
Page Count: 228
Publisher: West Virginia Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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