To Lay To Rest Our Ghosts

4.5
Caitlin Hamilton Summie's ten stories in To Lay To Rest Our Ghosts are heartfelt revelations into the universal experience of loss and grief. Told in the first person, each story offers a fully rounded and complex character caught in crisis. The stories are set in the upper Midwest where people 'grew up cold'.

The writing is lovely and evocative, transporting us into another's life and world.

A girl whose father is a WWII pilot the admits that the war's generals were spoken of as if her family knew them personally. "I knew these men better than my father."

A woman's sister dies in a car crash. Their mother had died choking on a peanut butter sandwich. (This is not a joke. I was barely twenty when I met a man whose sister chocked to show more death on a peanut butter sandwich. I worry about this every time I have a PB sandwich.) The woman misses being close to her brother. She drinks too much.

I related to a woman who lasted only six months in New York City, lacking inner city street smarts and an understanding of the rules. My husband and I lived in the inner city for a year and a half before leaving.

The fierce need for independence drives a paraplegic to the family's deep woods cabin after his divorce. His brother fears for his safety living alone and pressures him to return.

A woman visits her grandmother in the nursing home. She is desperately curious about her grandmother's sister, who no one speaks of. Yet that sister's name is embroidered on the family patchwork quilt. The woman asks her mother about this missing family member and is told that the grandmother asked her not to talk about it, "not to carry that particular ghost through the generations." The woman presses for information in a battle over who would control the past.

A man who grew up on a farm grapples with his son's wanting a different life for himself. The son fears his newborn son will never understand who he is without understanding the farm.

The death of a grandfather brings division between sisters, one who attended him in his illness and death while the other stayed away. Their own needs drive them apart as they try to find reconciliation.

A single mother watches her only child, a daughter, leave for college. She had gone to California instead of taking a college scholarship, returning home pregnant. Now she is a mother, learning how to let go.

An elderly man is bedridden in his son's house, his memory teeming with ghosts. He knows his son and daughter-in-law are getting weary while he lingers on. I was reminded of my grandfather Milo, my grandmother's second husband. He lived to be over 101, outlasting two wives and a daughter and three step-children. He wondered why God did not take him. He was unable to walk and was blind, living in my aunt's home. To have one's mind and a failing body is a horrible fate.

After a miscarriage, a wife takes a break, leaving her husband to struggle on his own for a few days. He is comforted by a neighbor's dog who has adopted him as a surrogate owner. The neighbors are friendly but keep to themselves. The man realizes he did not even know his own wife's heart. He contemplates loss and grief and how we are all separate and alone in grief.

I purchased this as an ebook and read the stories over several weeks. I love these short stories; they are like a concentrated laser light into the human soul.

Owner of Caitlin Hamilton Marketing & Publicity, promotion for books, authors, publishers, and literary organizations, Caitlin has represented several books I have reviewed, The Velveteen Daughter by Laurel Davis Huber, This Is How it Begins by Joan Dempsey, and Wild Mountain by Nancy Hayes Kilgore. show less

When I read Caitlin Hamilton Summie’s To Lay to Rest Our Ghosts, I was moved by the descriptions of the environments where the stories took place. They were so vivid, and I must say accurate, because I have lived in the Twin Cities where many are set. There’s that quiet sense of isolation that lends even greater intensity to an event. Her descriptive talents made me feel the dark and the cold and see the snow once again. These images are as much a part of the appeal as the stories, themselves. I admit to loving short stories and there was not a one in this collection that didn’t touch me in some way. The pull of family is strong, so is the sense of loss. I, as a reader, felt it deeply.

This book contains ten very well written short stories. The subject matter is all about family, discovering family, leaving family, returning to family. Brothers, Sisters, Children, Grandparents, Fathers and Sons, Mothers and Daughters trying to hold family together, with varying degrees of success. Daughters pulling away while mothers hold on. Grievances that fester to the point of poisoning relationships. Loving but not really liking your sibling. Husbands who learn about grief that never leaves but learn how to carry it.

In “Tags” our narrator, Dolores, knew her father only by her last name. When all the fathers left for the war the women moved into Grammy’s house in Kansas City. Children remembering Fathers lost in the war, show more remembering the smell of soap while being hugged, remembering the smell of cigarettes, trying to remember fathers who became “vague and shadowy”, fathers who never returned home.

In “Growing Up Cold” One runs, two stay, one returns, one is lost, how do you say goodbye?

In “Points of Exchange” everything was determined by where you live. If it was by a stop sign in New York City you lived at the point of exchange. Twenty-three-year-old Jenny Nelson needs to leave Minnesota, needs to be something else, somewhere else. It takes a sandal-clad hop-scotch skipping kid to teach her that she will never belong where she has landed, she will never be able to join that community of women. Her community is waiting for her, she just needs to figure it out.

Each story is so poignant in its simplicity and heartbreaking in the telling of family dust-ups, coming together, tearing apart, realizations of what might have come before and what will never be a part of the future.

Thank you NetGalley and Fomite for a copy. show less

The ten stories in this book are not related. Then again they are in some ways in that they share an overall tone. I will be the first to admit that short stories and I do not get along. They seem to exist somewhere above my head and I always feel like I am missing something. I’ve written it before – I just don’t think I’m smart enough for short stories. Or maybe smart enough isn’t the right phrase, perhaps it’s insightful. I tend to be a very literal person.

I will note that I enjoyed reading the stories in this collection which is a change from other short story offerings I have reviewed. Not that I fully understood what was going on but it didn’t seem to be as necessary. The writing is just lovely. It flows in show more beautifully descriptive ways bringing the reader completely into the environment in very short order. I truly respect an author that can do this in so few pages.

Whether it was the sadness of a war death or the brutal cold of a Minnesota winter I felt what the characters were feeling and found myself crying on more than one occasion even if I didn’t fully understand why. Such is the power of Ms. Summie’s words. If you enjoy introspection and short stories I am sure you will love this book. It certainly made me think about some of the characters long after I had finished the last story. show less

4.5 Gorgeous, heartfelt stories, from the first to the last. All the characters in the stories are looking back, to a time or place, situation that made a big impression on them. The ghosts they carry of these past events, some looking for closure, others return home to a place of safety. The descriptive writing, the cold, the snow, boots crunching, branches glistening, spot on for the upper Midwest. Autumn and the carpet of leaves, cooler nights, hot chocolate and fire places for warmth

The characters seem so very real, I actually could picture and indeed feel a part of these stories, the writing is so evocative, inclusive. A librarian and her young daughter and friends, temporarily lost in a snow storm, a man remembering the first show more time he saw a calf born, remembering when his son his born that his son, because of his decision will never see nor experience the things he did growing up in a farm. So many of these are memorable because of the little details, in the first story, a pair of dog tags from a dead father.

All these stories are complete in themselves, a very difficult thing to do in shorts, a very rare find.

Thanks, Angela. show less