Some diverting anecdotes about life in upstate New York, although many lack tension and depth.
Short stories about family life inspired by a strong faith and belief in miracles.
Beyea opens this collection of fiction and memoir with an endearing story about Sam—a puppy that the narrator’s four children adopted right off their front porch: “Yes, it was just a mutt, but to our kids this was the purest of pure breeds, delivered to them by divine providence.” Sam has a happy, full life despite her sad ending, and Beyea is not entirely figurative when he describes the dog as being delivered by divine providence. Overall, these stories are about everyday life, stressing a belief in God and occasionally invoking typical dad humor. In “He Was a Forty Niner,” the author remembers his “workaholic” father who used to take him and his older brother Bud to the “woodlot” where they would “recreate” things—cutting trees, converting them into fence posts, and indulging in other woodworking projects. In “Baked Beans and Apple Pie,” Beyea remembers his equally industrious mother, Gertie, an “expert seamstress and chef.” Overall, the stories focus on the positive and read more like anecdotal memories than complete narratives; Beyea is a reflective narrator, but his stories lack plot development and other aspects of truly engaging storytelling. The primary strength of the book is in its candor and rumination on the simpler things in life, such as bird-watching and taking in beautiful scenery. Describing his lake house on Lake Champlain, Beyea writes, “We watched magnificent bald eagles, swoop like dive bombers and snatch fish from the lake. For over a year, we were content to relax on our deck and enjoy the beauty created by God.” As a retired New York City police officer, Beyea also offers an intriguing perspective on criminal justice; in one vignette, he remembers coordinating a “restorative justice” program for youth in Clinton County in upstate New York.
Some diverting anecdotes about life in upstate New York, although many lack tension and depth.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5320-8413-3
Page Count: 156
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The spirit of grace under pressure and creativity under fire animates a wonderfully diverse set of stories.
Ng selects 20 stories that illustrate why we might still read fiction in a time of disinformation and lies.
As the trials and tribulations of the 21st century have unfolded, the Best American Short Stories anthology has become a particular way of taking the temperature of each passing year. As Ng writes in her introduction to the latest group, “Short stories in particular can act like little tuning forks, helping us to clarify our own values—then allowing us to bring ourselves into alignment with what we believe. In a time when our values are being tested daily, it’s hard to think of anything more important.” Many of them are also fun to read, a quality appreciated more than ever by depressed and overwhelmed readers. The stories are ordered alphabetically, a structure maintained in the following selection, which is unfortunately limited by space. “Take Me to Kirkland,” by Sarah Anderson, is very funny, a little weird, and certainly one of Costco’s finest hours. “What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?” by Emma Binder is a cinematic mini-thriller about a trans kid visiting his hometown, terrified of being “clocked” by the people he grew up with after he saves a local from drowning. “Time of the Preacher,” by Bret Anthony Johnston, is one of several pandemic stories—in it, a snake, which may or may not be under the refrigerator, inspires a quarantine-breaking cry for help from a fence-builder’s ex-wife. Another story of that time, “Yellow Tulips,” by Nathan Curtis Roberts, also combines endearing, funny first-person narration with a more serious theme. A Mormon man in an uptight Utah suburb has to manage his developmentally disabled adult son through the complexities of quarantine. One day, he discovers that his son has “gotten into the provisions Mormons are all but commanded to keep, eating Nutella and Marshmallow Fluff from their jars.…Brig, we put these things aside for the apocalypse,’” the father says, while his son “grinned gleefully, sugary goo smeared across his lips and fingers. ‘It’s an apocalypse now!’”
The spirit of grace under pressure and creativity under fire animates a wonderfully diverse set of stories.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780063399808
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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