Eduardo Santiago
OMG so bleak. Very difficult going at first: hard to feel anything other than contempt for the characters. I persevered, and contempt became pity, which I know is not much better. Finally, halfway through, compassion set in and stayed.
Same day I started reading this, there was an AskReddit thread, What’s something you always assumed was mandatory in life—until you met someone who just… didn’t do it? and almost all the top answers related to communicating, listening, engaging with others. I kept thinking about that while reading. How generational trauma and broken systems trap us with no role models or good examples. How the trauma is passed down and around.
Impressive first work, shows promise. His metaphors felt strained at times ("when night dripped over") and some of the young-child-POV stories were implausibly precocious ("there was no escaping how those problems shaped us all, no escaping the end, like the way the ice melts in the river each spring"). A few continuity glitches and some repetition, likely because these were published previously as individual stories. (This book is described as a collection, and in theory it is, but the stories all form a consistent -- although chronologically jumbled -- first-person narrative comprising one man's childhood through adulthood). Not sure who I'd recommend this to, but I'm glad to have read it.
OMG so bleak. Very difficult going at first: hard to feel anything other than contempt for the characters. I persevered, and contempt became pity, which I know is not much better. Finally, halfway through, compassion set in and stayed.
Same day I started reading this, there was an AskReddit thread, What’s something you always assumed was mandatory in life—until you met someone who just… didn’t do it? and almost all the top answers related to communicating, listening, engaging with others. I kept thinking about that while reading. How generational trauma and broken systems trap us with no role models or good examples. How the trauma is passed down and around.
Impressive first work, shows promise. His metaphors felt strained at times ("when night dripped over") and some of the young-child-POV stories were implausibly precocious ("there was no escaping how those problems shaped us all, no escaping the end, like the way the ice melts in the river each spring"). A few continuity glitches and some repetition, likely because these were published previously as individual stories. (This book is described as a collection, and in theory it is, but the stories all form a consistent -- although chronologically jumbled -- first-person narrative comprising one man's childhood through adulthood). Not sure who I'd recommend this to, but I'm glad to have read it.