Character and Detail: Anthony Koranda's Broken Bottles
Review by Adam Van Winkle
Available from Tortoise Books
When I teach creative writing to eager college students hell bent on over-plotting and over-describing and over-swerving their stories, I preach again and again: character and detail.
Make me care about a character, be selective with your details so that they become elemental to the story you want to tell.
Granted, they don't all want to be realists. But, I tell them, make me care about your character, make me smell and feel your details. If that happens, as a reader I'll fall in love and be taken on any ride you want me to take me on.
Anthony Koranda's novel Broken Bottles from Tortoise Books is a ride through Chicago and coming of age you'll want to take. You'll fall in love with Alex and all his torture: alcoholic parents, a mother trying to be sober and caring, a stepfather that was the father now absent and unresponsive to the letter's his ex-stepson writes, theft and jail, to the confessional in Our Lady of Lourdes on Ashland with his girlfriend's grandfather in tow. All the while Jordan and Pippen and the Bulls rise to prominence.
I lived in Chicago for five years. I'm an ex-stepson myself. But that's not the reason I love this book. I knew from the instant I first read "Warren Park" when Koranda submitted it to Cowboy Jamboree Magazine that this was a writer that knew his characters, that inhabited space with them, that sent the smell and feel of their experiences through the page to the reader. I could not know at the time that "Warren Park" was but a chapter in a bildungsroman of the highest order.
I kept thinking of Season 4 of The Wire in reading Koranda's story. A masterful tale of urban grit and the growing up of troubled youth in its wasted lives. Plenty of despair, glimpses of hope. All enough to keep me wanting more. David Simon couldn't have written it better.
Alex's search for home moves through the people and streets of Chicago, real enough to touch. And the novel, despite some of its early despair, has perhaps the most touching ending you'll read in a long time, the narrator matured now to his first gray hair, seen by God, and finally home over a plate of mac and cheese.
If I could shout through your screen I would yell, "Get this book! Savor it! Smell and feel these characters and places! Love Broken Bottles the way I do!" It's the biggest favor I can offer.
Review by Adam Van Winkle
Available from Tortoise Books
When I teach creative writing to eager college students hell bent on over-plotting and over-describing and over-swerving their stories, I preach again and again: character and detail.
Make me care about a character, be selective with your details so that they become elemental to the story you want to tell.
Granted, they don't all want to be realists. But, I tell them, make me care about your character, make me smell and feel your details. If that happens, as a reader I'll fall in love and be taken on any ride you want me to take me on.
Anthony Koranda's novel Broken Bottles from Tortoise Books is a ride through Chicago and coming of age you'll want to take. You'll fall in love with Alex and all his torture: alcoholic parents, a mother trying to be sober and caring, a stepfather that was the father now absent and unresponsive to the letter's his ex-stepson writes, theft and jail, to the confessional in Our Lady of Lourdes on Ashland with his girlfriend's grandfather in tow. All the while Jordan and Pippen and the Bulls rise to prominence.
I lived in Chicago for five years. I'm an ex-stepson myself. But that's not the reason I love this book. I knew from the instant I first read "Warren Park" when Koranda submitted it to Cowboy Jamboree Magazine that this was a writer that knew his characters, that inhabited space with them, that sent the smell and feel of their experiences through the page to the reader. I could not know at the time that "Warren Park" was but a chapter in a bildungsroman of the highest order.
I kept thinking of Season 4 of The Wire in reading Koranda's story. A masterful tale of urban grit and the growing up of troubled youth in its wasted lives. Plenty of despair, glimpses of hope. All enough to keep me wanting more. David Simon couldn't have written it better.
Alex's search for home moves through the people and streets of Chicago, real enough to touch. And the novel, despite some of its early despair, has perhaps the most touching ending you'll read in a long time, the narrator matured now to his first gray hair, seen by God, and finally home over a plate of mac and cheese.
If I could shout through your screen I would yell, "Get this book! Savor it! Smell and feel these characters and places! Love Broken Bottles the way I do!" It's the biggest favor I can offer.