What Fun It Was… to read Brooklyn Family Scenes—so much fun, in fact, that I read it twice, and a few of the stories three times. I love your prose and the way you manage to convey an image with absolute clarity using just a handful of words. I’m reminded of the way a cartoonist can produce a familiar face with just a few seemingly random strokes of a pen. I swear, sometimes I felt like I was right there in the middle of the scene, witnessing the action in person. I’m not sure why that is, actually. Part of the reason must be that what you describe strikes chords in people who have made—or are in the process of making—the not so easy transition from grandchild to grandparent, and, what’s more, are closer to the grandparent end of the process. Such people have grieved over the loss of family members, exulted in the thrill of passion, delighted in love beyond words, and seen the closing of the circle, i.e., realized that they are to their children what their parents used to be to them (you call it passing the torch). All this your words summon up beautifully, so the appeal has to go well beyond Brooklyn. I don’t think this explanation suffices, though. Maybe it’s a question of wavelength; your writing appeals to me in the same way I might like a particular piece of music or painting. When this sort of thing happens, we tend to say, “this is good music”, or “this painting is beautiful”, as if our personal taste were somehow a measure of what constitutes quality in a medium for which there probably is no truly objective way to assess excellence. At the risk of making this mistake, then, I’ll say that your prose is excellent. Another aspect of it is that I have always been partial to books that deal in retrospective (nostalgia, if you will). Favorite examples include the beginning of Herman Wouk’s Inside,Outside and, more recently, Trevanian’s The Crazyladies of Pearl Street. It strikes me that this is autobiographical nostalgia, which may be yet another reason I like it. Regardless of whether the stories are firmly anchored in reality or whether they have been embellished by the author, the fact is that they are about real people, and this, to me, adds to the appeal.” Daniel Kiechle, Author/Editor, (Valbonne, France)
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Brooklyn Family Scenes
ISBN: 978-1-60402-882-9
Click cover to read sample
