A poetry collection about family origins that buries the lede.
Stawowy presents a character-driven collection of poetry.
This book of poems follows a family across several generations. The author begins with a direct address to her ancestors, declaring, “Your stories, hidden gospels, and I, the heretic who decodes them” (“Dear Ancestors”). The book begins with a section on her biological family circa 1924 and 1925. In “Fern: The Expert,” readers meet Harry, a barber married in a shotgun wedding to Bertha (Fern is their “shotgun baby”). Harry’s mistress, Faye, refuses to “throw away good years like dishwater on petunias” (“Faye: I’ll Get What I Want”). George, the husband left behind, drinks from a “brown bag of grief” (“George: Wait a Minute”).The second section of the book features her adoptive family in the years between 1925 and 1960. The speaker lives with “Fred: Counterfeit Father,” sisters Doris and Florence, and a bitter mother named Belle. Doris soon departs for Chicago, and Fred feels left behind by his offspring. The third section of the book follows the “fractured family” from 1960 to 2018. Doris leaves her husband, claiming “I gave him a precious gift. He just doesn’t know it yet” (“Doris: Leaving Him”). Doris suffers from dementia. The final two poems find the poet reconciling her mother’s erroneous family tree with DNA testing, using writing to mend the story. Stawowy excels at making metaphors and similes. She describes “murmuring snails under a milk moon” (“Dear Ancestors”)and the way aging turns a face into “a frail map, antiquated” (“Faye, Age Seventy: Ignored at the Family Party”). The poet also experiments with form: There are poems written in the form of an advice column, one in which the columnist advises a wife worried about her husband’s absence to “guide that donkey back to the barn” (“Bertha: Asking for Advice”).Throughout, the poet adopts the voices of different characters. As the cast grows, it becomes challenging to keep them all straight—or feel deeply invested in their individual narrative arcs. It is not until the epilogue that Stawowy provides the context necessary to understand the poems.
A poetry collection about family origins that buries the lede.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781639803279
Page Count: 57
Publisher: Kelsay Books
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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