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What Luck, This Life

by Kathryn Schwille

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1211,621,796 (3.5)3
"What Luck, This Life begins in the aftermath of the space shuttle's break-up, as the people of Piney Woods watch their pastures swarm with searchers and reporters bluster at their doors. A shop owner defends herself against a sexual predator who is pushed to new boldness after he is disinvited to his family reunion. A closeted father facing a divorce that will leave his gifted boy adrift retrieves an astronaut's remains. An engineer who dreams of orbiting earth joins a search for debris and instead uncovers an old neighbor's buried longing. In a chorus of voices spanning places and years, What Luck, This Life explores the Columbia disaster's surprising fallout for a town beset by the tensions of class, race, and missed opportunity. Evoking Sherwood Anderson's classic Winesburg, Ohio and Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, the novel's unforgettable characters struggle with family upheaval and mortality's grip and a luminous book emerges -- filled with heartache, beauty and warmth." --… (more)
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Kathryn Schwille's debut novel is structured as a series of short stories and vignettes all centered on the dying town of Kiser, deep in the thickets of east Texas. When the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated in the air in 2003, the pieces rained down on this rural community. Schwille explores the lives of the ordinary people in Kiser, their dreams and disappointments, all against that measure of time of before and after the disaster.

Schwille's writing is similar to that of Elizabeth Strout and Alice Munroe. She has an eye for detail and a love of the ordinary. She manages a compassion for all of her characters from the most hapless to the most manipulative. This is an impressive debut and I'm looking forward to reading whatever she writes next. ( )
  RidgewayGirl | Nov 1, 2018 |
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"What Luck, This Life begins in the aftermath of the space shuttle's break-up, as the people of Piney Woods watch their pastures swarm with searchers and reporters bluster at their doors. A shop owner defends herself against a sexual predator who is pushed to new boldness after he is disinvited to his family reunion. A closeted father facing a divorce that will leave his gifted boy adrift retrieves an astronaut's remains. An engineer who dreams of orbiting earth joins a search for debris and instead uncovers an old neighbor's buried longing. In a chorus of voices spanning places and years, What Luck, This Life explores the Columbia disaster's surprising fallout for a town beset by the tensions of class, race, and missed opportunity. Evoking Sherwood Anderson's classic Winesburg, Ohio and Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, the novel's unforgettable characters struggle with family upheaval and mortality's grip and a luminous book emerges -- filled with heartache, beauty and warmth." --

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