Review by Booklist Review
D'Ambrosio's writing exhibits a striking maturity and depth, belying the fact that this story collection heralds his debut. Although D'Ambrosio generally chooses to deal with tough, even oppressive situations--for instance, a boy coping with his father's suicide, a young man dealing with his companion's rapidly advancing cancer, and a friend's inevitable drunken car crash--his prose is invariably distinguished by a refined and captivating buoyancy. This collection signals a writer of great promise, one with an apparently effortless ability to see the pervasive state of grace surrounding all struggles with dilemma. --Alice Joyce
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
D'Ambrosio makes his literary debut with a collection of short stories as fluid and compelling as a river rushing into darkness. Though many of the selections repeat similar characters and situationsfailing relationships, pilgrimages to the site of a suicide, uncommunicative, alcoholic fatherstogether they are like a room full of mirrors, each story reflecting (or magnifying or distorting) an aspect of another. In the title piece, one of 13-year-old Kurt Pittman's chores is to escort safely home his mother's drunken, crisis-beset party guests. Gifted with an understanding of other people beyond his years, the boy remarks, ``The idea was thisthat at a certain age, a black hole emerged in the middle of your life... and you pretended it wasn't there and never looked directly at it, if you could manage the trick.'' Unfortunately, few of D'Ambrosio's characters can manage the trick. Some of them, numbed by alcohol and the rainy coldness of the Pacific Northwest, think God might be the way out of their private emotional hells. But it is those who persevere who eventually reap rewardsas will readers of these seven dreamy and engrossing tales. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
An exciting debut collection, these stories have already received several honors, including the Aga Kahn Fiction Prize and inclusion in Best Short Stories 1991. They are a wildly divergent lot, sharing neither characters nor geography, nor even, at times, a common sensibility. But that variety, that inventiveness is part of the book's pleasure. What these stories do share is a wonderful fullness; they have a richness and complexity that we have grown unaccustomed to in short stories. The title story is a knockout. It's narrated by a young teenager whose job it is to escort his mother's drunken friends home from their weekly bashes. "I suppose it was better than a paper route." Tonight's trip with Mrs. Gurney, as funny as it's sad, is a moving examination of loss, whether it be husbands to infidelity, mothers to alcohol, or fathers to suicide. Indeed, love is often lost in these seductive stories but seldom found. Strongly recommended.-Brian Kenney, Brooklyn P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
This debut collection of stories from a crackerjack craftsman lacks a coherent theme, almost as if D'Ambrosio had chosen a magic number (seven, in this case) of complete stories and decided to publish them when he reached it. That said, each of these stories, some of which appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere, is excellent in its own right. D'Ambrosio consistently presents new ways of seeing familiar things. Sometimes the thematic fragmentation actually works to his advantage, forcing the reader to begin each tale with a clean slate, but more often it is disconcerting. In the poignant title story, a young boy is enlisted by his mother to walk a drunken guest home from a party, uncertain whether she is coming on to him Mrs. Robinsonstyle or not, and along the way he recalls the suicide of his father. In ``American Bullfrog,'' another confused young man hesitates to carve up his frog in freshman biology class and runs away from home--but lamely can think of nowhere to go beyond his buddy's house. There are also a few stories of vacant people unable to express their emotions. In ``Her Real Name,'' a man picks up a religious young woman working at an Illinois gas station who believes that her cancer is in remission due to an act of God. Separation is present here, too: ``Open House'' is narrated by one son in a large family whose parents are divorcing after a long, violent marriage and whose brother Jackie was a teenage junkie who killed himself. ``Lyricism'' has two sections: In the first, a man and woman visit Lake Placid on vacation in October; in the second, the man wanders alone on a January evening. Individually, these are imaginative stories, but they're linked by few common threads of theme, place, or literary structure.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
