December 15, 2012
As this classically restrained, valiantly imagined, and profoundly affecting narrative sequence begins, Kirkpatrick brings us to a place of wind, birds, wheat, soybeans, and corn. Some fields are so gold they seem to be singing, but they will be harvested with blades. This ominous note signals the start of a journey into shock and loss, remedy and recovery. Body and mind are aligned with the small prairie town of Odessa and vast open landscapes as Kirkpatrick tracks the painful subtraction of an unsought divorce, stringent legal rituals, and rough redefinition of self, home, and purpose. But these traumas pale in comparison to the discovery of a brain tumor pressing on the very seat of emotion and memory and endangering the core of her narrator's being. The brain, like the earth, lies in layers, she muses, and, as her medical odyssey unfolds, Odessa becomes an underworld of dreams and myth, quest and risk, metamorphosis and renewal. Kirkpatrick descends, returns, and reports with stunning lucidity, Small fires burn faintly / but don't go out. Beautifully forthright and ringing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)