Afbeelding auteur

Lorraine Devon Wilke

Auteur van The Alchemy of Noise: A Novel

4 Werken 25 Leden 5 Besprekingen

Werken van Lorraine Devon Wilke

The Alchemy of Noise: A Novel (2019) 10 exemplaren
Hysterical Love: a novel (2015) 7 exemplaren
After the Sucker Punch: a Novel (2014) 6 exemplaren
She Tumbled Down: a short story (2014) 2 exemplaren

Tagged

Algemene kennis

Er zijn nog geen Algemene Kennis-gegevens over deze auteur. Je kunt helpen.

Leden

Besprekingen

A 21-year-old woman leaves a New Year’s Eve party after a spat with her boyfriend.
At about the same time and very inebriated man leaves another party to head home. The two of them meet on a dark street, she while walking in a crosswalk, he in a speeding luxury vehicle.
After the impact, he leaves the scene to make the necessary arrangements to keep his life intact while she lies dying on the roadside. He never even gets out of the vehicle.
In She Tumbled Down, author Lorraine Devon Wilke asks, “What kind of person could do such a thing...hit someone then just drive away?” and then she goes on to answer it.
Told from the point of view of the perpetrator, Wilke enters into his world of rationalization and justification. As the story unfolds and three years pass, the reader is brought to the brink of empathy, just as the woman who has fallen in love with him is when he confesses to her. He’s repentant, he helps others, he tries to be the best person he can be, admitting his crime now would do more harm than good.
What should she do? What would you do?
This is a masterfully told tale, flawlessly written with authentic characters and brimming with drama and reality. A remarkable achievement in the difficult genre of the short story.
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
RodRaglin | Apr 30, 2022 |
Dan McDowell is a thirty-three-year-old commercial photographer three years into a comfortable relationship with Jane. They both are, if not ambitious, gainfully employed, well-mannered and appropriate. Dan seems quite content to continue to take pictures of school children, Jane to crunch numbers at a real estate firm, both seem satisfied with routine monogamous sex and enjoy Jane’s homemade pie afterwards. They neither have the will nor inclination to do anything about the boring middle-class trap that’s about to ensnare them.

Indeed, that very evening they’re discussing the inevitable – marriage – when Dan lets slip that three years ago, he had sex with his former girlfriend during the transitional period before he and Jane were “exclusive”.

Jane freaks and throws him out of their cozy two-bedroom bungalow where he conveniently crosses the lawn and becomes ensconced in the spare bedroom of his good friend and neighbour, Bob.

What’s with Jane, Dan wonders, and true to his even-tempered, considerate personality gives her some space and time until she accepts that his transgression is nothing compared to the mundane existence they can share moving forward.

Five weeks later Jane is still intransigent, and Dan is becoming a tad impatient. Surprisingly, so are his parents. His reply to their inquiries about his relationship provokes a grumpy response from his father, Big Jim, “You’re dealt a hand and you play it. End of story.”, which has enough subliminal meaning to upset his mother, Esther.

When Dan tells his sister, Lucy, she divulges that the subtext of that conversation has to do with a manuscript she and her mother discovered of a heartbreaking story Big Jim wrote about being dumped by his “soul mate” Barbara from Oakland right after he finished college and eight years before he married their mom.

Perhaps it’s the precarious state of Dan's own relationship or maybe it’s just that he’s such a sensitive guy, but this romantic illusion resonates, and unimaginative Dan begins to imagine he and Jane maybe aren’t cosmically bonded and what does that mean for their future?

This flight of adolescent flakiness takes a dramatic turn when Big Jim suffers a stroke and in that interim period when brain synapses are scrambled, and recovery is still in question he utters a strangled plea for someone to “caa…baaa…baaa”.

For some reason, Dan assumes his father, who’s been as happily married to Esther as one can reasonably hope to be after forty years, is calling out for Barbara from Oakland.

This sets the stage for Dan’s frantic week-long quest in the other city by the bay for his father’s enigmatic soul mate. What he hopes to achieve if he finds her is never clear, but he has “to do something that might actually have some impact”. The resulting impact of this misadventure is more bizarre than meaningful.

If you think this preamble into Hysterical Love, by Lorraine Devon Wilke, is complicated then you have some idea of how convoluted the story is. Though cohesive, the narrative is rambling and impeded by long passages of moralizing dialogue and redundant reflection most of which is self-evident to any mature adult.

Major plot points such as Jane’s reason for ejecting her fiancé from their relationship and their domicile, the discovery and significance that Big Jim had his young heart broken eight years before he married Esther, the motive behind the search for Barbara from Oakland, and the improbable hookup with a love goddess named Fiona, really stretched this reader’s suspension of disbelief.

Perhaps most unconvincing is the protagonist who is immature, hypersensitive, prone to histrionics, bitchy (compared to his assertive sister) and, one would imagine, almost devoid of testosterone. At one point, when he is turning down a zipless encounter with the unimaginably attractive, sexy, and oh so willing Fiona, the virtuous Dan declares “…tonight, I want to be sure we’re honestly in synch with each other”, then doubles down by affirming “Yep, I’d become the girl. The girl who didn’t want to get down to it until she knew it “meant something.”

Was it the author’s intention to convey feminine sensibilities in a male character or is she just having a difficult time writing from a male perspective?

Considering a protagonist like Dan, you might think character growth and development would be easy and extensive. But no, he’s the same milquetoast at the end as he was at the beginning. It’s as if Wilke considered him fully formed with no need to change or improve.

Sometimes pushing the boundaries of genre works, like writing chick lit from a male perspective, but in the case of Hysterical Love, it’s still chick lit only without the chick.
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
RodRaglin | 1 andere bespreking | Apr 11, 2022 |
Thirty-six-year-old Tessa Curzio has returned home for her father’s funeral. While the wake bangs on downstairs, she’s sitting alone in her childhood bedroom reading some really shitty things he wrote about her in his journals.
So begins After the Sucker Punch by Lorraine Devon Wilke, an intense, emotional story about how Tessa and the rest of her five siblings try to reconcile the man they thought they knew with his painfully critical assessment of them all as portrayed in his daily journals – journals he specifically left for them to read upon his death.
As with all family dynamics, some children are more affected by their parent's behaviour than others, and for Tessa, it’s a devastating blow to her self-esteem and sends her life into a tailspin.
In an attempt for Tessa to understand her father’s motive and her role in what he wrote, Wilke skillfully eviscerates the Curzio family and tosses the entrails on the kitchen table for interpretation – an analysis that for many readers will strike close to home because what the author reveals is the universal need for children to feel loved and appreciated by their parents not so much because of what they achieve, but simply to validate that unique child-parent bond.
As the story unfolds it becomes apparent Tessa is prone to melodrama and one begins to wonder if she would have been more satisfied with an irresponsible father, but one who said “love ya” every time they parted, or the man who unstintingly sacrificed his entire life to provide for his family?
It’s a fine line between having Tessa appear shallow and whiney without diminishing her pain. It’s difficult to portray a protagonist in an unsympathetic light however that’s what makes this main character so authentic and the writing so convincing.
Wilke’s prose is powerful and gritty and the story well-structured. The characters are people you know or want to know (or maybe not), the conversations are ones you’ve had or wish you’d had, and the narrative is filled with life and energy like you hope yours is or will be.
An ambitious undertaking, the novel introduces multiple complex relationships as well as parallel subplots that examine friendships, love, faith, and career in our contemporary society.
An intriguing premise, After the Sucker Punch is professionally presented and makes for an entertaining and fulfilling reading experience.
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
RodRaglin | Mar 26, 2022 |
An entertaining while scathing commentary about race relations in America.

Sidonie Frame is the manager one of Chicago’s buzziest small concert and event venues. When her sound manager goes AWOL along with essential equipment she has her assistant bring in another company to fill in temporarily.
Chris Hawkins is owner of Sound Alchemy and immediately he and Sidonie have a connection.
Author Lorraine Devon Wilke tells the story from two points of view and establishes her protagonists as equals in regards to education, income and aspirations. The only difference, other than gender, is Chris is black and Sidonie’s white.
Temporary work becomes permanent and friendship turns to love for Chris and Sid. The last thing they think about is the colour of each other’s skin, but that’s not the case for some friends and family members.
This is upsetting for Sidonie, but not surprising and she’s prepared to deal with it. What she isn’t prepared for or incapable of handling is the reality of a black man living in America.
Here’s how Wilke has her character, Sidonie, express it.
“What I didn’t know then is that by falling in love with you I would be stepping from my world into yours. Or maybe, more accurately, straddling both. I didn’t know that because I didn’t fully realize there were two worlds, two really distinct worlds with different sets of rules ...”
The Alchemy of Noise is an entertaining love story and so much more. The author’s take on inherent and systemic racism, something her characters are challenged with daily, sounds authentic and credible. In that regard, it is an important book that deserves a larger audience.
The book itself is a pleasure to read with believable dialogue, fully developed characters and exceptionally good diction, something that’s becoming increasingly rare. The plot is well-crafted and try as I might I couldn’t find one scene that didn’t develop character or advance the plot or both.
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
RodRaglin | Jun 11, 2019 |

Prijzen

Statistieken

Werken
4
Leden
25
Populariteit
#508,561
Waardering
4.0
Besprekingen
5
ISBNs
6