Deft, sensitive coming-of-age tale.
Ten interconnected stories about two kids growing up in suburban Michigan during the 1970s and coping with the erratic behavior of their unstable mother and her eccentric suitor.
Both winsome and damaged, Paige is a high-strung, creative type hit especially hard by single-motherhood when her husband goes on a “trip” and never returns. She drives the kids to school wearing a mink coat over her pajamas, and dabbles in porcupine-quill crafts after her babysitter, Susie Medecinehat, shows her how to extract the quills from road-kill carcasses. Annie and her little brother, Gus, adore their mother, even as they are afraid of what she might do next. Practical in her way, she takes the kids on a “vacation” by hotwiring her absent neighbor’s station wagon, with no idea of how to stop the purloined vehicle. After they make it back home, thanks in part to a possibly dangerous hitchhiker, she voluntarily commits herself to a psychiatric facility, leaving the kids with her brittle, childless sister Claire. Once released, Paige struggles to get well, while fending off the advances of smitten electrician Shepherd Nash. A part-time party singer with the gentleness of a poet, Shepherd displays a childlike enthusiasm that wins over the father-figure-hungry kids, while frightening their mother, who seems to suspect he might be even crazier than she is. Shepherd’s over-the-top courtship style is best exemplified when he gifts his lady love with possibly the ugliest piano ever made, salvaged from a barroom and covered with the etched-in phone numbers of former patrons. Shepherd’s never-say-die attitude—he asks for Paige’s hand some 12 times—is often pathetic but also somewhat noble, and he and Paige make a deeply flawed but interesting pair. While slight in effect, Litzenburger’s second novel (after The Widower, 2006) boasts a winning narrator in eight-year-old Annie, who is forced to grow up quickly as the adults around her fall apart. And bright, defenseless first-grader Gus just might break your heart.
Deft, sensitive coming-of-age tale.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2007
ISBN: 0-307-33955-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
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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