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How to Hold a Woman
An emotionally powerful book; it is organic, surprising, and edgy in a way that will appeal to male readers as well as female readers. It has the potential to be groundbreaking in its raw, honest portrayal of a just-barely-functioning family. Billy Lombardo is interested in the beauty of words. He is also a great observer of the world around him, and he is exquisite and precise in getting that world onto the page. Billy Lombardo is the author of The Logic of a Chicago Stories , a Chicago Tribune “Best Fiction of 2005” selection. His novel Man With Two Arms is due from The Overlook Press in 2010.
166 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
June 17, 2009
The slender novel-in-stories is not about what happened to Isabel, the Daisy Buchanan-quoting pubescent eldest child of Alan and Audrey Taylor; it is about what is happening to the Taylor family in her absence. At first, it feels as if you’re being deprived of essential information. Over the subsequent five or so years, as the Taylor family stretches between the isolation of despair and the bond of love, it becomes apparent that Lombardo isn’t depriving you of what happened—he’s showing you how it keeps happening: to Alan and Audrey’s marriage despite their love; to her younger brothers Dex and Sammy, who are old enough to know that their drawing of Baseball Guy, a sketch of a ballplayer diving for a catch—his hat flying off—is symbolic of something more.
It is a beautiful book, so rich with the truths of so many kinds of love that it seems simple.
Check out the full review:
http://www.examiner.com/x-416-Chicago...
It is a beautiful book, so rich with the truths of so many kinds of love that it seems simple.
Check out the full review:
http://www.examiner.com/x-416-Chicago...
June 21, 2017
Painfully realistic and true. Really shows the after effects in a family that has lost a child.
October 25, 2013
The following review has been copied from http://behnamriahi.tumblr.com
How to Hold a Woman, written by Billy Lombardo and published by Other Voices Books, is a novel-in-short-stories told from the points-of-view of the Taylor family. After one horrible, life-defining tragedy, Alan and Audrey Taylor find themselves drifting from each other, all while their children grow to accept the dysfunction of their lives, remembering only faint glimmers of the pain that made them, as the family musters all its strength in order to keep whole.
Who doesn’t love a novel-in-short-stories? I think it’s the quintessential symbol of literary fiction in modern publishing. A novel or a collection of short stories in/and/of themselves have been commandeered by genre and literary fiction alike, so for someone trying to introduce themselves into the literary fold without immediately attaching themselves to the classics, it can be hard to parse the quote-unquote literature from everything else. First and foremost, while I identify myself as a person who writes literature, I think the distinction between the two is a matter of elitism. Why can’t sci-fi be literary? Or horror? Or detective stories? Defining literary fiction can be difficult, but it basically boils down to the idea of character over plot. In literary fiction, plot can be sparse, so long as each piece is a deep analysis of character and how those characters behave in their imposed circumstances. That’s why novel-in-short-stories is almost exclusively pinned to literary fiction—because of its extreme disconnect with an overall plot, while still maintaining publishable quality. So why can’t genre fiction have that same qualities? It can—it just usually doesn’t, and thus the elitism is born. In truth, I think all fiction and nonfiction ought to be literary—I think the distinction should fade, because at the end of the day, while using the term literary may make the author or its publisher sound pretentious, it does identify a quality of work that hovers above the sub-standard, plot-oriented narratives of genre that tend to ignore character—the James Patterson's of the world who want to, “put the reader in the character's shoes,” so to speak. Of course, the only way that literature, as it's called, can be more pretentious is by continuing to make the distinction between the two even when one book or story maintains a quality of strong character and plot within confines of the genre—that's what writers have universally termed as cross-genre, which in my opinion automatically becomes more elite than the word literary itself because it inherently states that genre, as is, can't maintain the “literary” quality. I blame academia for this, though more and more, graduate programs are advertising teachings in writing “popular” fiction, so who really knows what tomorrow's literary will be? Unpopular opinion time: Who cares? When a story is good, a story is good, period.
Thus, we arrive at Billy Lombardo’s first book and the how the question of literary comes into context. I say that, because this book has pretty weak characters. Its central protagonists, Audrey and Alan, are the kind of characters that are easy to hate, but not the kind of characters that you like to hate. It almost reads as if Lombardo wants you to like these two characters, but you simply don’t—they’re wealthy enough to live in one of Chicago’s most expensive neighborhoods, they don’t really worry about money or struggle, they just dote over each other constantly despite their growing discontent for each other. At any given moment, they’ll switch careers on a whim and you have to wonder what kind of money they fell into or how they found it, though there’s no explanation. They simply have the cash to fuck around needlessly, though they spend their time lamenting the loss of each other and their unwillingness to get back together. It’s tiring, really. In fact, following their crappy relationship is damn near exhausting due to the measure of their ineptitude. But they’re not the kind of characters that you like to hate—Lombardo goes through great lengths in attempt to make the characters easy to relate to, expending page count in slipping into their pasts and moments of first-world-rebellion so much that I almost mistook it for a satire before realizing how serious he meant for them to seem, forcing us to relive the tragedy of their loss over-and-over amid their endless entitlement. They are characters that you don’t want to hate—you just simply do.
In addition to being well-developed assholes, Audrey and Alan are a pair of sparse described people. I get a sense for what their fashion taste is (horrible), but I have no idea what either character looks like. He describes them in minimal, poetic segments in reference to their own ego. We don’t really get a strong physical description of either them or their children though—in fact, the most described character in the whole book is some half-retarded brute that Audrey shares a bus ride with once. His descriptions are so infinitesimal that apartments, homes, etc. in their obscurity only serve to hide how douchey the Taylor family actually is. It’s like he’s putting a blanket over the furnishings so we can’t see that they’re even worse people than we already think they are. I found it best to imagine ipod docks and flat screen TVs, even though this novel is told primarily just after the turn of the century. They just seem like the kind of people that have a lot of shit like that because. If, for any reason, we’re poised on the precipice of an actual realization of how shitty this couple is, Lombardo falls back into a flashback crisis-tragedy again anyway, so it doesn’t even matter if they sleep on beds stuffed with hundred dollar bills. Apparently, all he wants to actually show is their excuses for being unhappy.
They’re not the only two lousy characters in the book—early on, one of their children dies. It isn’t clear exactly what happened to her until the end of the book—we only know that one minute, the kid is there and everyone is so happy they’re crying and then, in the next minute, everyone is so sad they’re crying. However, the loss of that child felt weak. Though this tragedy continues to affect these two assholes for the rest of the book, the child itself is only a caricature of a child, trying their best to reach out to their emotionally distant father (he takes trips to study wildlife, gee whiz) by miming his interests back to him. That child’s death, even after the recitation of literature that I actually liked, struck me as being another excuse for these melodramatic people to be more melodramatic. I wish, for just a second, that I could have liked the kid, that I could have felt pain for its loss, but in truth, I only felt like Lombardo contrived their intangible, sentimental bond as some flimsy plot device to begin the miserable futures of these miserable characters.
However, despite all of this, there is some good qualities to this narrative. Lombardo is a poetic writer indeed, each sentence moving with beautiful prose that soaks you to the bone. However, it doesn’t read stiffly, and when he shifts to first-person point-of-view, the voice changes with the shift fluidly and reads as the character would write it. The combination of the beautiful writing and the controlled shifts makes this a fun read, just to follow his similes, metaphors, and careful craft in wording. You can hate the characters as much as you want, but you can’t hate the prose—it reads like a poet wrote it, so it’s no surprise that Lombardo earned his chops in poetry slams at the Green Mill.
Speaking of the Green Mill, I am wont to call this a Chicago book, only because of the sparse description. While he doesn’t describe the people or the homes these characters live in, he does give you accurate street names and locations. To that extent, as a denizen of those streets myself, I could conjure the sights and smells myself in order to evoke a sense of place that’s been excluded from this story, though for anyone not living in Chicago, they may just easily imagine a suburb or even a rural town instead of the high-rising sprawl that is Chicago. By denoting actual places, a Chicago reader could easily fill in the blanks that Lombardo leaves, though that benefit is for Chicagoans alone. Of course, plenty of great novels are Chicago novels, and hey—who doesn’t want to be associated with the greatest city in the world? Of course, that might just be my bias.
While Lombardo’s poetic prose is very tantalizing, he truly hits his stride when he steps out of it, into the point-of-view of Alan and Audrey’s children. You know Alan and Audrey are assholes and that’s fine, but their children are only just children of assholes. To that extent, they’re actually engaging as they watch the dissemination of their family at their parents hands. The only time I felt anything throughout my reading of this was near the end, when their son recalls how the tragedy affected him and summarizes how it ended their family—I nearly cried at that moment because of his point-of-view alone, after having spent the rest of the novel feeling nothing but disgust for everyone else. His use of metaphor from a child’s perspective, denoting things that child innocently doesn’t even know are metaphor, is so finely crafted that you can’t help but fall in love with the naivete of these sheltered kids as they come to terms with their own suffering. He does so without misleading the audience by going into that inept, child-talk voice that so many other writers succumb to—the child is coherent and intelligent enough to express himself,speaking clearly and resolutely without falling back on the dialect of some cliched farce.
So here’s the skinny—this book is as good as it is bad. Because of its layout and characters and despite its flaws, I’d still call it literature. After all, literature may be a mark of quality to some readers, but because of our definitions for literature, it has become a genre. And just like with any genre, there’s some good and some bad and you just have to live with it. Abolish cross-genre and just write whatever the fuck you want to. Back to Lombardo, I have no .5 star on this blog, so I’ll be honest with you: I’m giving an extra .5 of a star because Lombardo acknowledges so many writers that I actually admire at the end of the book. I wouldn’t recommend it though.
How to Hold a Woman, written by Billy Lombardo and published by Other Voices Books, is a novel-in-short-stories told from the points-of-view of the Taylor family. After one horrible, life-defining tragedy, Alan and Audrey Taylor find themselves drifting from each other, all while their children grow to accept the dysfunction of their lives, remembering only faint glimmers of the pain that made them, as the family musters all its strength in order to keep whole.
Who doesn’t love a novel-in-short-stories? I think it’s the quintessential symbol of literary fiction in modern publishing. A novel or a collection of short stories in/and/of themselves have been commandeered by genre and literary fiction alike, so for someone trying to introduce themselves into the literary fold without immediately attaching themselves to the classics, it can be hard to parse the quote-unquote literature from everything else. First and foremost, while I identify myself as a person who writes literature, I think the distinction between the two is a matter of elitism. Why can’t sci-fi be literary? Or horror? Or detective stories? Defining literary fiction can be difficult, but it basically boils down to the idea of character over plot. In literary fiction, plot can be sparse, so long as each piece is a deep analysis of character and how those characters behave in their imposed circumstances. That’s why novel-in-short-stories is almost exclusively pinned to literary fiction—because of its extreme disconnect with an overall plot, while still maintaining publishable quality. So why can’t genre fiction have that same qualities? It can—it just usually doesn’t, and thus the elitism is born. In truth, I think all fiction and nonfiction ought to be literary—I think the distinction should fade, because at the end of the day, while using the term literary may make the author or its publisher sound pretentious, it does identify a quality of work that hovers above the sub-standard, plot-oriented narratives of genre that tend to ignore character—the James Patterson's of the world who want to, “put the reader in the character's shoes,” so to speak. Of course, the only way that literature, as it's called, can be more pretentious is by continuing to make the distinction between the two even when one book or story maintains a quality of strong character and plot within confines of the genre—that's what writers have universally termed as cross-genre, which in my opinion automatically becomes more elite than the word literary itself because it inherently states that genre, as is, can't maintain the “literary” quality. I blame academia for this, though more and more, graduate programs are advertising teachings in writing “popular” fiction, so who really knows what tomorrow's literary will be? Unpopular opinion time: Who cares? When a story is good, a story is good, period.
Thus, we arrive at Billy Lombardo’s first book and the how the question of literary comes into context. I say that, because this book has pretty weak characters. Its central protagonists, Audrey and Alan, are the kind of characters that are easy to hate, but not the kind of characters that you like to hate. It almost reads as if Lombardo wants you to like these two characters, but you simply don’t—they’re wealthy enough to live in one of Chicago’s most expensive neighborhoods, they don’t really worry about money or struggle, they just dote over each other constantly despite their growing discontent for each other. At any given moment, they’ll switch careers on a whim and you have to wonder what kind of money they fell into or how they found it, though there’s no explanation. They simply have the cash to fuck around needlessly, though they spend their time lamenting the loss of each other and their unwillingness to get back together. It’s tiring, really. In fact, following their crappy relationship is damn near exhausting due to the measure of their ineptitude. But they’re not the kind of characters that you like to hate—Lombardo goes through great lengths in attempt to make the characters easy to relate to, expending page count in slipping into their pasts and moments of first-world-rebellion so much that I almost mistook it for a satire before realizing how serious he meant for them to seem, forcing us to relive the tragedy of their loss over-and-over amid their endless entitlement. They are characters that you don’t want to hate—you just simply do.
In addition to being well-developed assholes, Audrey and Alan are a pair of sparse described people. I get a sense for what their fashion taste is (horrible), but I have no idea what either character looks like. He describes them in minimal, poetic segments in reference to their own ego. We don’t really get a strong physical description of either them or their children though—in fact, the most described character in the whole book is some half-retarded brute that Audrey shares a bus ride with once. His descriptions are so infinitesimal that apartments, homes, etc. in their obscurity only serve to hide how douchey the Taylor family actually is. It’s like he’s putting a blanket over the furnishings so we can’t see that they’re even worse people than we already think they are. I found it best to imagine ipod docks and flat screen TVs, even though this novel is told primarily just after the turn of the century. They just seem like the kind of people that have a lot of shit like that because. If, for any reason, we’re poised on the precipice of an actual realization of how shitty this couple is, Lombardo falls back into a flashback crisis-tragedy again anyway, so it doesn’t even matter if they sleep on beds stuffed with hundred dollar bills. Apparently, all he wants to actually show is their excuses for being unhappy.
They’re not the only two lousy characters in the book—early on, one of their children dies. It isn’t clear exactly what happened to her until the end of the book—we only know that one minute, the kid is there and everyone is so happy they’re crying and then, in the next minute, everyone is so sad they’re crying. However, the loss of that child felt weak. Though this tragedy continues to affect these two assholes for the rest of the book, the child itself is only a caricature of a child, trying their best to reach out to their emotionally distant father (he takes trips to study wildlife, gee whiz) by miming his interests back to him. That child’s death, even after the recitation of literature that I actually liked, struck me as being another excuse for these melodramatic people to be more melodramatic. I wish, for just a second, that I could have liked the kid, that I could have felt pain for its loss, but in truth, I only felt like Lombardo contrived their intangible, sentimental bond as some flimsy plot device to begin the miserable futures of these miserable characters.
However, despite all of this, there is some good qualities to this narrative. Lombardo is a poetic writer indeed, each sentence moving with beautiful prose that soaks you to the bone. However, it doesn’t read stiffly, and when he shifts to first-person point-of-view, the voice changes with the shift fluidly and reads as the character would write it. The combination of the beautiful writing and the controlled shifts makes this a fun read, just to follow his similes, metaphors, and careful craft in wording. You can hate the characters as much as you want, but you can’t hate the prose—it reads like a poet wrote it, so it’s no surprise that Lombardo earned his chops in poetry slams at the Green Mill.
Speaking of the Green Mill, I am wont to call this a Chicago book, only because of the sparse description. While he doesn’t describe the people or the homes these characters live in, he does give you accurate street names and locations. To that extent, as a denizen of those streets myself, I could conjure the sights and smells myself in order to evoke a sense of place that’s been excluded from this story, though for anyone not living in Chicago, they may just easily imagine a suburb or even a rural town instead of the high-rising sprawl that is Chicago. By denoting actual places, a Chicago reader could easily fill in the blanks that Lombardo leaves, though that benefit is for Chicagoans alone. Of course, plenty of great novels are Chicago novels, and hey—who doesn’t want to be associated with the greatest city in the world? Of course, that might just be my bias.
While Lombardo’s poetic prose is very tantalizing, he truly hits his stride when he steps out of it, into the point-of-view of Alan and Audrey’s children. You know Alan and Audrey are assholes and that’s fine, but their children are only just children of assholes. To that extent, they’re actually engaging as they watch the dissemination of their family at their parents hands. The only time I felt anything throughout my reading of this was near the end, when their son recalls how the tragedy affected him and summarizes how it ended their family—I nearly cried at that moment because of his point-of-view alone, after having spent the rest of the novel feeling nothing but disgust for everyone else. His use of metaphor from a child’s perspective, denoting things that child innocently doesn’t even know are metaphor, is so finely crafted that you can’t help but fall in love with the naivete of these sheltered kids as they come to terms with their own suffering. He does so without misleading the audience by going into that inept, child-talk voice that so many other writers succumb to—the child is coherent and intelligent enough to express himself,speaking clearly and resolutely without falling back on the dialect of some cliched farce.
So here’s the skinny—this book is as good as it is bad. Because of its layout and characters and despite its flaws, I’d still call it literature. After all, literature may be a mark of quality to some readers, but because of our definitions for literature, it has become a genre. And just like with any genre, there’s some good and some bad and you just have to live with it. Abolish cross-genre and just write whatever the fuck you want to. Back to Lombardo, I have no .5 star on this blog, so I’ll be honest with you: I’m giving an extra .5 of a star because Lombardo acknowledges so many writers that I actually admire at the end of the book. I wouldn’t recommend it though.
January 20, 2020
That's the best book I've read in a long time. The emotions and characters and story were so vivid. I loved it.
January 6, 2015
There is a lot to like about this book: it's realistic and believable, it has a tangible sense of place (which I personally really like when books succeed with that), and it has occasional images that are so lovely as to be poetic. I like its structure: the chapters aren't so much an interlinking progression as they are separate vignettes, leaving the reader to bridge some links on their own. At times, such a structure can seem lazy or incoherent, but it works here, because you're given enough background info to make the connections. Somehow, filling in the blanks gives a sense of participation in the story, further heightened because Lombardo succeeds in creating realistic characters. You could easily know these people, and be hearing about their story from them, rather than reading about it. Once in a while, Lombardo misses with his dialogue -- it's stilted and unrealistic, particularly in cases where kids are talking. But for the most part, he is right on, from the small details up through the bigger story, which, although short, is by turns believable, moving, and enjoyable (if achingly sad, at times). I would love to see this book, and this writer, get wider recognition than just in Chicago, where he's from. This effort certainly warrants it.
December 31, 2009
Long a staple of Chicago's slam poetry scene, Lombardo cemented himself as one of Chicago's best emerging writers with this first novel-in-stories in the summer of '09.
Ever since then I loved this book so much!
You live it once, forward, but parts come back to you randomly. It's like a relationship like that. Each story jumps in time, years sometimes. Things change and have changed - every moment feels like an afterwards, a present, and a precursor.
A family struggles, all sides adeptly told, things mess things up, the love remains. And maybe we can't go back to the places we miss, but maybe we can find and make new places with the people we love.
Keep an eye on Billy Lombardo.
Ever since then I loved this book so much!
You live it once, forward, but parts come back to you randomly. It's like a relationship like that. Each story jumps in time, years sometimes. Things change and have changed - every moment feels like an afterwards, a present, and a precursor.
A family struggles, all sides adeptly told, things mess things up, the love remains. And maybe we can't go back to the places we miss, but maybe we can find and make new places with the people we love.
Keep an eye on Billy Lombardo.
August 17, 2009
I read the first chapter aloud to my wife and I thought about how I liked that Billy Lombardo was referencing places that I knew and also frequented. I began thinking about how neat it could be to have him do an author reading at the restaurant named in the first chapter.
I was not prepared for what followed.
Although not a technically elegant writer, Lombardo is intensely honest and cut me to my heart.
This is an author who understands how to write in various voices (man, woman, child), understands loss, and how inarticulate humans can be in dealing with grief and love.
I believe that there is hope in this book. I know the story of the Taylor family will stay with me for a long while.
I was not prepared for what followed.
Although not a technically elegant writer, Lombardo is intensely honest and cut me to my heart.
This is an author who understands how to write in various voices (man, woman, child), understands loss, and how inarticulate humans can be in dealing with grief and love.
I believe that there is hope in this book. I know the story of the Taylor family will stay with me for a long while.
July 25, 2009
This is a story of a family's grief, told through the mother's, father's and one son's voices. I originally didn't like how the actual event of the daughter's disappearance and death is completely left a mystery until the end, and even then it's not really explained all that much. But by the time I got there it seemed more appropriate that way, to focus on the family rather than the event. The characters are heartbreaking and it's interesting to see how each of them deals with grief differently, how it tears them apart and brings them together. I may read this book again sometime.
September 30, 2010
So sad but interesting. Interesting to see what may happen to individuals in a family who looses a child suddenly and violently. The mother's pain and how she manifests it but slowly tries to work through it. The father dealing with it in his own way, but trying to keep it all together. Separating but still a glimmer of hope. It seemed that love wasn't the issue but how to deal with tragedy.
Would have liked more explanation with less gaps between times told. Liked the format with one whole story broken into short stories. Kept me intrigued with what's next.
Would have liked more explanation with less gaps between times told. Liked the format with one whole story broken into short stories. Kept me intrigued with what's next.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 4, 2016
I think I could probably re-read this book a bajillion times and still love it more intensely with each read through. It is so raw and honest and real. I knew from the first page or two that it was gonna be one of THOSE books and it didn't disappoint. I love the way he plays with forms, trying out some how-to's and mixing in some letter forms. There's also enlightening uses of POV, which normally drives me nuts, but is done so tastefully in this novel. Can't say enough good things about it. I wish there was more. I wish I could dive into the pages and be absorbed by all of these words.
December 27, 2009
WHAT AN AMAZING BOOK!
At times heartbreaking and at times very funny, this is the best book I have read in a long time. This book tells the story of a family trying to coke with the loss of a daughter who suddenly goes missing one evening. I found the stories very beautiful and quite "Chicago" in feeling. My favorite chapter is "The White Rose of Chicago" - page 61. Go ahead and check it out.
-Shannon
At times heartbreaking and at times very funny, this is the best book I have read in a long time. This book tells the story of a family trying to coke with the loss of a daughter who suddenly goes missing one evening. I found the stories very beautiful and quite "Chicago" in feeling. My favorite chapter is "The White Rose of Chicago" - page 61. Go ahead and check it out.
-Shannon
January 25, 2010
A touching story about the emotional complexity of male/female relationships, particularly focusing on how the two deal with tragedy, and the sometimes competing definition of "love". Also an interesting commentary on how men view intimacy as a gauge of a healthy relationship. Also a thoughtful look at the thought process of a man contemplating (but not engaging in) infidelity. And I liked the style of writing a long story through a series of shorter stories.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 8, 2014
In HOW TO HOLD A WOMAN, Billy Lombardo tells the story of a family's disintegration in the wake of the sort of tragedy every parent dreads. In nine short-story-like chapters, Lombardo takes the reader through the devastation of Alan and Audrey Taylor's marriage and the changes it brings about for their two sons. The book ends without any resolution, leaving the reader with the same lack of closure the Taylor's feel throughout the telling of their tale.
August 5, 2009
A very tender, moving portrayal of a family dealing with the tragic loss of a child. The final chapter is a real gut smasher/tear jerker, but it's so good and touching. This is the second book in a row I've read by a Chicago writer that featured a dynamite final chapter/story. From this I take: Chicagoans know how to end things. Does that mean something/anything? It sounds good...
December 29, 2012
A novel in stories, stories as fragments, stories about how one family falls apart, blow by blow, and piece by piece, until, maybe, possibly, re-building again. It is crushing, but it is also knowing, which makes the feeling of being crushed all the worse.
More - http://bentanzer.blogspot.com/2012/12...
More - http://bentanzer.blogspot.com/2012/12...
October 24, 2019
A beautiful, 2 hour read, "How to Hold a Woman" is a novel steeped in love and isolation, loss and hope. I loved the mystery unfolding, I loved the solitary scenes of one character, in their own head, just thinking.
This novel is too short to review in much further detail, but it is definitely worth any readers time to sit down with this book, and enjoy it.
This novel is too short to review in much further detail, but it is definitely worth any readers time to sit down with this book, and enjoy it.
August 6, 2009
Similar in genre to Olive Kitteridge but the characters seem more "human" and believable to me. This writer lives in Forest Park and the story takes place in Chicago, River Forest, Forest Park and the surrounding areas. It's fun to read a book that takes place where you live!
August 16, 2009
Billy lombardo's debut work was something I wasn't really prepared for when i sat down to read. The writing is heartwrenching and real and sad and as honest as you could ever ask for. This is such a great work and i really hope Billy will keep writing, just like this!!! loved it.
April 23, 2012
I wish it was longer. It was like looking through someone's window and briefly overhearing a conversation. Imagination and common knowledge fill in the blanks though you're never exactly sure what happened.
May 18, 2013
Lombardo tells a sad story through a series of short excerpts that link together to reveal the dynamics of one family's struggle and realizations. Even if it's not the most captivating thing I've read lately, the conciseness and creative approach made it well worthwhile.
September 20, 2013
A family going through the motions of life year after year as they each try to deal with their loss; loss of a sister, loss of a child. By the end of this short story, despite their various paths, a strong family bond leads them back to one another.
Read
June 13, 2009I don't rate books for which I played a role in publishing, however...
My description coming soon...
My description coming soon...
July 3, 2009
well, this book is first of all super cool because i know the author and second of all super cool because it made me cry.
July 18, 2009
The review the Chicago Reader published of this book was maybe the most offensively stupid book review I've ever read.
August 31, 2009
loved it. a little book by a great author.
July 5, 2010
Actually, I'm going 3.5 with this one. Heartbreaking...picked up towards the end. Interesting allusions to places in the Chi!
June 23, 2011
Powerful, heartbreaking and honest. Chicago's Billy Lombardo packs a punch in this collection of related short stories.
February 28, 2012
I really loved this little book. I was not aware of Billy Lombardo before but I am eager to read anything he writes - hope there are more books soon!!
December 30, 2013
I'm still thinking about this one and I may read it again since it's a short novel. Right now it's a 3.5.
July 11, 2010
this is a beautifully written tale of grief & emptiness & sorrow.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews