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A sweeping portrait of post-Vietnam America seen through the eyes of a young woman searching for the courage to go home again. It is 1968. Riley is thirteen, and her brother Mick has gone missing in Vietnam. She struggles to understand and accept, but the world she has always known has fallen apart. At sixteen, she meets a boy from the reservation. He becomes her first love and perhaps her deliverance, except that he, too, is sent to fight, unaware that Riley is carrying his child. Riley sets off then, in search of answers, of clues, of a way to be in the world. She travels from her family's Montana farm to San Francisco, and from there to Saigon. Along the way she becomes rescued and rescuer, by and for a band of scarred angels. Among them: Primo, a half-blind vet with a story he's not telling; Lu, a cab driver with an artist's eye and a habit she can't kick; Phuong, a Saigon barmaid who is Riley's conscience and confidante; and Grace, a banjo-playing girl on a train, carrying her dreams and her grandmother's ashes in a tin box. All are casualties, of the times and of the war, but they carry on, none more tenaciously than Riley herself, a masterpiece of courage and vulnerability, wondering if she'll ever be brave enough to return to the place she once called home.… (more)
User reviews
I loved Riley, she makes so many mistakes, drugs, alcohol, leaving jobs, leaving relationships, never letting anything nor anyone become too important. So afraid of loss, she must always leave first. She does try to help those who she thinks need help the most, drug users, former vets, and people whom have lost their way. She never apologizes for who she is. This is such a gritty story, the sixties and the seventies and the drug culture, the draft and the war also of course the eighties and the AIDS epidemic. She will return home and knows than that she is lucky that there is still a chance and maybe a little something still left there for her.
This is this author's first novel and it is amazingly written. Easy to identify with because there cannot be that many of us that have never made a bad decision in life, or wish that we could turn back the clock and do something differently. Not a easy novel but a worthy one.