Ten openly celebratory new stories, in a fifth collection, from the prolific Cooper (In Search of Satisfaction, 1994, etc.). With her characteristic wit and aplomband effortless colloquial stylethe author leads her high-spirited, modern-day heroines on their hard (but usually rewarding) life's journeys. Women all need the same thing, Cooper asserts time and again: to strike a critical balance between finding love and findingand keepingthemselves. And though these protagonists make mistakes and fall often into traps set for women since the beginning of time, they're eventually offered redemption and indeed happiness by dint of their own learned wisdom. ``Femme Fatale'' plays with the traditional meaning of that phrase as Darlin' Roscoe's version of Everywoman undergoes a radical transformation for the better. In ``The Way It Is,'' Melody learns after losing the love of her life that it's more-than-OK to pass up Mr. So-So even if it means holding out all alone for Mr. Right. The inspirational ``Yellow House Road'' features MLee (so named by a mother who had 13 children and no time to learn to spell), who leaves her lazy husband to discover what she wants out of lifeand learns that just by trying she ``can DO things by herself, for herself.'' But Cooper is no full-fledged Pollyanna: ``Sure Is a Shame'' concerns Inez and her sorry sister Gartha, two women who made bad choices and couldn't (or wouldn't) escape them; ``A Will and a Way'' has a tragic loss at its center, one not adequately compensated for by its unsatisfying end. Overall, though, the cumulative experiences of these invincible, irrepressible women create an unforgettable, uplifting collection. Funny, real, warm, and right on the money: stories from a gifted author that help to do womankind proud. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-46787-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
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
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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