I am so ambivalent about this book that it’s taken me several minutes to compose this first sentence. I want to read some satisfying fiction, and this was not it. We start out in 1941 with our protagonist Juliet blowing stuff up in the science lab at school. I am on board with this. I’m thinking this is going to be a book about a woman doing science during the war having to deal with everything this entails. This is not what the book is about. It’s […]
I was a coward. I went to the war.
But this too is true: stories can save us. I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now, and even still, right here, I keep dreaming Linda alive. And Ted Lavender, too, and Kiowa, and Curt Lemon, and a slim young man I killed, and an old man sprawled beside a pigpen, and several others whose bodies I once lifted and dumped into a truck. They’re all dead. But in a story, which is kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return […]