In the opening story, \u201cChristmas Holiday, 1945,\u201d a veteran returning home to Chicago after Germany\u2019s surrender prepares to meet the wife he hasn\u2019t seen in two years. Upon arriving in America, he visits his sister, Edith, a nun who\u2019s about to embark on a missionary voyage to China. In \u201cThe Visit,\u201d a man named Rob struggles with feelings of guilt and loss as he travels from Detroit, Michigan, to Raleigh, North Carolina, in the wake of his mother\u2019s death. In \u201cMarooned in Marrakesh,\u201d a married couple visiting their son, Mike, who\u2019s joined the Peace Corps, find themselves stranded in Morocco on September 11, 2001. \u201cRecluse\u201d follows Vincent Jackson, a disabled Vietnam veteran who attends a music festival. A performer is murdered onstage, and Jackson\u2014who was also onstage at the time\u2014is wrongly suspected of murder. A married couple in \u201cMaggie\u201d must put down a beloved pet, and in \u201cHurricane Helene,\u201d residents of Asheville, North Carolina, try to recover after much of the town, including the famous River Arts District, is destroyed in a flood; \u201cHitchhiking to Hingning\u201d recalls the story of Edith that was begun in the first vignette. These deeply engrossing, slice-of-life episodes have the air of a folk song, in which characters are quickly introduced (often in medias res) and presented with low-stakes problems. The lack of resolution in several tales only further enhances a sense of the uncanny. Certain tales stand out: \u201cChristmas Holiday, 1945\u201d beautifully conveys the anxiety and jubilation of the first Christmas after the war\u2019s end, \u201cMarooned in Marrakesh\u201d and \u201cRecluse\u201d feature people in desperate straits who command the reader\u2019s sympathy, and the character of Vincent Jackson feels like someone dreamed up by Johnny Cash or Kenny Rogers. Despite the occasional anachronism (such as a woman in the 1940s eating sesame chicken, which didn\u2019t gain popularity until the \u201970s), the stories set in the past are immersive and credibly rendered. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the opening story, \u201cChristmas Holiday, 1945,\u201d a veteran returning home to Chicago after Germany\u2019s surrender prepares to meet the wife he hasn\u2019t seen in two years. Upon arriving in America, he visits his sister, Edith, a nun who\u2019s about to embark on a missionary voyage to China. In \u201cThe Visit,\u201d a man named Rob […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5986,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5985"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5985\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}