LITTLE AVALANCHES

The daughter of a military veteran struggles to understand her father.

With graceful prose, Ellis describes growing up in the shadow of her father, Louis Keith Boswell Jr., a World War II combat veteran who returned home with numerous medals for valor, including a coveted Silver Star. Despite Boswell becoming the beloved “local doctor” in their California town after the war, the family deteriorated. The author’s parents eventually divorced and began volleying accusations of child neglect during custody battles, while Ellis and her brother periodically visited their father and his new, free-spirited girlfriend, who was “half his age but with twice his pizzazz.” The author writes vividly of her father’s tough-love parenting style. He graphically recounted stories about slaughtering Nazis in cold blood, gruffly taught her how to shoot a gun, and approved of her grueling dental treatments without Novocain. Her attempts to compassionately bond with her father proved futile and only exacerbated what would ultimately be uncovered as untreated battlefield PTSD, manifesting in nightmares, flashbacks, and paranoid obsessions with home surveillance. Bisecting the primary narrative is a harrowing epistolary section from Boswell’s perspective, chronicling the sheer brutality of his six-month wintertime stint with the specially trained nighttime combat fighters called Timberwolves. Ellis, now a mother herself, writes eloquently and poignantly about the night she quizzed her father about his past and he became a wellspring of emotional confessions, meticulously depicting the painful episodes of his grueling tour of duty. “One story at a time,” she writes, “he revealed himself to me.” Ellis finally achieved long-anticipated clarity and emotional healing at the conclusion of their intensive yearlong father-daughter discussions. Wartime veterans and their children will find this uncommonly strong debut a meaningful reading experience, and general readers will be moved by the story.

A moving, melancholy, and ultimately cathartic examination of wartime trauma across generations.