While showing signs of a burgeoning talent, these Welsh tales lack consistency.
A debut collection of short stories speaks of love, vulnerability, and salvation.
Ten tales are offered here, each geographically tied to Wales. The first and longest, “Marged Evans,” tells of the eponymous heroine, a reclusive archivist set in her ways. Her life changes when she receives an unexpected Christmas card, which leads to a chain of events whereby she begins to reconnect with the world. To mirror her protagonist’s fastidiousness, the author delves regularly into overly scrupulous details, which prove engaging when describing street life but less so when dealing with the mundanities of central heating: “Even the heating of the house was kept at the minimum; central heating had been installed during the seventies, and the boiler, although old, was still functional.” The result is a turgid narrative that needs a ruthless edit. Subsequent stories suffer from the opposite problem: they are too short, underdeveloped, and have weak storylines. “Blue Skies” tells of a student taking her first trip overseas but lacks substance; “The Raindrop” imagines a community in the Western world faced with drought but reveals little other than attitudes change without water; and “The Cottage on the Hill: A Monologue” presents a heavily diluted rebuke of the rat race. Where Fletcher-Edwards truly comes into her own is in “Oi, you!,” the story of a child abused by his parents. To make the reader feel as small and vulnerable as this boy requires masterful skill: “His lifetime of crouching, of holding his pockmarked knees to his quivering chin, had left an indelible stain against the age-old wallpaper—the only thing that had seemed to give solace and refuge from the constant pain.” This is a disturbing, heartfelt, brilliant piece of writing that suggests a gifted author striving for consistency. Tales such as “The Annual Outing,” which features an artist setting up an easel on a headland and watching holidaymakers on the beach, reinforce this notion. The author’s observational skills are excellent here, yet the piece reads like a fragment rather than a complete story: “The colour of the shoreline mellowed from dark yellow, where the waves broke, to a golden hue, where the sun had dried the sand.” While readers with a love of Wales may connect with this book, others will likely lose patience with the collection’s imbalance.
While showing signs of a burgeoning talent, these Welsh tales lack consistency.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5246-6245-5
Page Count: 150
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
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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