Prisoners
Books / Hardcover
Books › Fiction › Historical
ISBN: 188068456X / Publisher: Curbstone Press, October 2000
Kiet, a runaway teenager, searches for her Black father, her own identity, and a way to end her pain
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The story of the runaway teenage orphan, Kiet, threads through Prisoners and reveals the other lives she touches as she searches for her Black father, for her own identity, for an end to her pain. They are lives that one way or another have been deeply affected by the Vietnam war and by the violent cycles of history to which she serves as a reminder: the things that will not go away. Kiet's journey takes her through Southern Maryland's Tidewater region, and to the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, and as it does, it reveals the lives of four men and two women who have been seared by the war she brings back to them. They include Mary Schulman, a nurse who sees her life trapped and defined by her husband Brian's refusal to let go of the past, and by the past's refusal to let go of her; Louise Hallam, a counselor of teenage girls, her husband Alex, the county sheriff, his friend Baxter and his deputy Russell: the men, Black and white, descendents of the same Hallam family with its double roots of privilege and oppression, "an old tension laying like a waterweight between them, full of dim, drowned figures, of crimes of war and family and skin never acknowledged or recompensed." All are in their own way prisoners, caught in a history that must be acknowledged before it can be buried and leave them in peace.
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