Christian Kiefer

The Heart of it All is set in a small community in North Central Ohio, where one factory is the only real job source in town. It is a place of stark, winter beauty and frigid cold. People travel to Cleveland or Columbus for doctors and items not found in the local Kroger.

The novel begins with a funeral and casseroles, a mother beaten down by her loss, her body aching with debilitating pain, the husband adrift and uncertain, their teenage daughter feeling a seismic shift that alienates her from her former life, the son’s best friend living in a home with abusive and drugs.

The father, Tom, works as foreman at the factory. He is a good man, a good worker, a good friend. His buddy Sam is always good for a laugh, but is liable to toss out offensive and racist remarks. He sneers at the overweight office manager, Mary Lou, and uses racist slurs towards the Pakistani factory owner, Khalid. His son is bullying Tom’s son.

Tom’s daughter finds herself intrigued by a newcomer in town, a young man from Cleveland come to live with his aunt who is the only African American in town. This outsider seems to be the only person she can relate to now, but he realizes he needs to warn her off even as he feels drawn to her.

Mary Lou has brought her aging mother into her home. Her mother has never shown her love and acceptance, leaving Mary Lou crippled by guilt and shame, alienated and alone.

Khalid’s parents have come to live with him. He saw his father as a successful businessman, and measured himself against his achievement. He is confused by the man who steps off the plane, who seems nothing like the father he knew. Khalid loves this country and the clean white snow, and is proud of what he has built. But in a MAGA world, simmering racism will soon impact his life.

This community, rife with heartache and pain, struggles to hold on–economically, emotionally, and socially. But small acts of kindness allow them to hold on, bear up, and even grow into better people with fuller lives.

The windows were increasingly fogged by the condensation of their mingling breath, so that the occasional vehicles and pedestrians that passed through their view seemed visitors from some other world, perhaps a better one than this, a world filled with grace, a world fille with mercy.
from The Heart of it All by Christian Kiefer

The long, gorgeous sentences illuminate the place and the emotional lives of the characters. My heart was warmed by scenes of friendship and acceptance, love in the midst of threat, people doing the right thing.

Set in rural Mid-America, heart of Trump country, with characters struggling to stay afloat, the story demonstrates a way to connect with people different from us. It is the kind of novel that envisions this messy world as place where individuals can make a difference, make it a better place. A novel with a positive moral force. I loved these flawed people and my heart ached with their pain and their hope.

I previous read and enjoyed Kiefer’s novel Phantoms.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book.… (plus d'informations)

Gorgeous writing, foreshadowing that draws the reader to turn pages, wonderful characters, and an exploration of deeply American themes propelled me to read Phantoms by Christian Kiefer in two sittings.

John Frazier returns from Vietnam a shattered man. He moves in with his grandmother and takes a job pumping gas. He becomes involved with two formidable women whose husbands were once best friends--a confidence man, becoming the bearer of the secrets of their entwined family histories dating to the 1940s.

Aunt Evelyn Wilson's husband ran an orchard. Kimiko Takahashi was a Japanese picture bride. Their husband worked together, friends over their shared love of the orchard. Their children grew up together.

The ugliness of racism underlies the story of star-crossed lovers separated by WWII and the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Japanese Removal Act, a story that ends in tragedy.

They would love each other. In secrecy and in silence. And then all of it would blown away, not only because of history but because of their very lives, adrift as they were in the swirling spinning sea between one continent and another.~ from Phantoms by Christian Kiefer
John has struggled for years to contain his experiences through his writing. His early promise as a 'war writer' has not been fulfilled. It is time to tell this other story, Ray Takahashi's story.

If the kind of experiences I had in Vietnam have already become a tired American myth, over told, overanalyzed, then perhaps this is a good enough reason to justify what I am trying to do in these pages, returning to the 1969 of my memory not to write about Vietnam at long last but instead to narrate the story of someone I did not know but whose time in Place County has come to feel inextricably tied to my own. ~from Phantom by Christian Kiefer

I love the language of this book. John notes that he had read Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe twice,"its sentences consuming me. O Lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again," and was reading it again after the war. I believe I have read it four times! I discovered Wolfe at sixteen in 1969, and fell in love with his language.

This grim story also is a celebration of life. The ending is a beautiful affirmation that brought strong emotions and a catch in my throat.

There are days--many of them--when golden light seems to pour forth from the very soil.~from Phantoms by Christian Kiefer

I purchased an ebook.… (plus d'informations)