At her best, Kupersmith writes lyrically haunting tales; she’s a writer to watch.
In Kupersmith’s debut collection, old men shape-shift into serpents, ghostly women lap at bath water, mute twins frighten their own father, a deathly ill man hungers to hear his driver’s story, and all have a price to pay.
The ghosts of Vietnam haunt the pages of this collection, and as characters tell each other tales, the act of storytelling becomes dangerous, for the past feeds upon the present. As the grandmother in “Boat Story” tells of a strange encounter during a storm, she questions whether one can ever escape the past, because escaping the storm must surely have come at a price. The best of these short stories, such as “Little Brother” and “The Red Veil,” are indeed disturbing. Set in the titular Frangipani Hotel, “Reception” deftly mixes humor with horror. The narrator, Phi, runs the desk because his English is fairly good. Once owned by Phi’s father and two uncles, the hotel now belongs only to his uncle Mr. Henry; Phi’s father committed suicide a few years after Phi’s other uncle drowned under mysterious circumstances. With his crazy ideas for boosting business (including a weird plastic fountain and mustard-yellow uniforms), Mr. Henry both exasperates and amuses his nephew. One day, however, Phi discovers a strange woman living in an officially unoccupied room. She exacts promises that set in motion a catastrophic collision between present and past, man and woman, America and Vietnam. Other tales are less successful, omitting links that would explain startling metamorphoses. In “Skin and Bones,” for example, an overweight girl is sent to visit her grandmother. She knows full well it’s really fat camp, and she’s willing to tell her story to a masked woman in exchange for delicious sandwiches. Her story may come at a cost, but Kupersmith’s tale leaves a lot of loose ends dangling.
At her best, Kupersmith writes lyrically haunting tales; she’s a writer to watch.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9331-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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 charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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