The Bullet Collection

Her prose is crystalline and delicate, and through her words, the beauty and aching of a life in transition glimmer like cut glass. Her young narrator, Marianna, yearns to construct definitions of home, living and loving that fit the ground beneath her feet. With an astute awareness of the brokenness within and around each of us, Marianna echoes truth in gorgeous and alarming ways. At once wistful, stunning and heartbreaking, Patricia's characters have reached me at unforgettable depths, and i strongly recommend this book... her GLCA New Writers award is well deserved! Find out for yourself!

"The magic of Lebanon infects any person born there and any visitor who steps onto the land for even just one day," writes Patricia Ward in her story about troubled teenage sisters in war-torn Beirut. The narrator, Marianna, and her sister are the offspring of an American/Armenian marriage. In this deeply personal coming-of-age novel each sister struggles to survive a near-fatal depression that is her own internal civil war. Marianna tells how her world grows smaller and smaller, until there is only her room-and then only her memories of a Lebanon both real and imagined. The adults in the sisters' lives inhabit an unreal world of denial, where civil war and depression are interspersed with hopeful truces, and family gatherings in the fresh piney mountains above the city prom-ise that all will soon be well. The sisters know better-or do they? "What is this magic, this country that insists on being remembered even after forcing us to leave?" Good memories and bad can be equally haunting, and even when Ward writes of despair, her prose is lyrically poetic. -WILLIAM TRACY

The author of this book takes the reader through a wonderful series of images, most of them haunting, but all of them sending thoughtful sparkles through the mind, like a tart juice. It is refreshing, but it wakes you up. From the first page, the reader is confronted with a paradox. The story is told by Marianne who is dangerously depressed, but it is also Marianne who is telling the story in a beautifully competent way. So, hope and despair are mixed from the beginning. Once started, it is difficult to put down. Get it, and treat yourself to some real thinking.

This is one of the most honest, evocative books I've ever read on how it is to grow up in war ... every day we're seeing images of war, but rarely do we confront with such bare honesty the destruction visited on families and children. This book isn't an easy read, but the writing is so lyrical and beautiful you're pulled along almost helplessly ... into a violent, unpredictable world few of us can imagine, traveling the narrator Marianna's difficult journey in her effort to somehow come to grips with her past. The layering of past with present is so skillfully done, the reader experiences memory the way it really happens, the way our lives are made up of layers that communicate with one another all the time. I'd recommend this book to anyone who is a serious reader. It is brilliant.

I bought this book after wandering into a reading given by the author--although it isn't an easy read, the effort is rewarded many times over, with Ms Ward's emotion caming through on every page. She obviously poured quite a bit of her life into the book, and the emotion tranlates to a haunting story of relationships and familial connections in a time of war. I found this especially timely against the background of our involvement in Iraq, when so often I am preoccupied with thoughts of the future. The Bullet Collection reminds us of the real people and continuing effect of war on children and the adults they become.