An uneven but ambitious collection that boldly explores the intersection of magic, queerness, and indigenous history.
In Prescott’s debut collection, a young Native American woman confronts colonialism, homophobia, and a history of erasure by reclaiming the stories of her people.
Tossed out of her father’s house on Wrangell Island in Alaska, Tova Agard strikes out on her own. When she meets a man collecting Native stories for the Smithsonian on the ferry to Seattle, it’s unclear whether he’s been sailing through the Gulf of Alaska for generations or only a few days. “Sometimes our stories take more than our lifetime to tell, you know,” Tova reveals, kicking off a cycle of tales about the Agards that stretches—and possibly disrupts—time itself. Ranging from myth to small-town gossip to family trauma, these 42 stories are loosely arranged to create generational echoes, though it's sometimes difficult to trace the many threads Prescott weaves. There’s Tova’s mother, Mina, still contending with abandonment and the consequences of teen pregnancy, while her father, Karl, struggles with masculinity, Tova’s queerness, and the viciousness of his own upbringing. Helene, Tova’s grandmother, runs off to join a 1970s alien cult, while Mina’s sisters remain to circle her in support. Amid the family saga, myth and collective memory intrude. Women transform into bears, explorer John Muir makes an appearance, Raven the trickster god causes trouble, and Tova may be the key to preventing colonialism from destroying her language and her people.
An uneven but ambitious collection that boldly explores the intersection of magic, queerness, and indigenous history.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59709-904-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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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