Alpha Mike Foxtrot John L Sheppard 9780984422364 Books
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The book is a great black-humored capture of the culture of the mid-00s, a Midwest full of oversized SUVs with yellow ribbon magnets on the back, with owners racking up credit card debt to keep the biggest TVs in every room of their house. This is the story of a guy named Joe, a soldier, but it starts after Iraq, after he got wounded and discharged, and has more to do with starting over, finding your duty in life after your duty in the armed forces has abruptly ended. He's got a mom with cancer and a brother that's schizophrenic, and instead of immersing himself in that drama, he thumbs his way to the Midwest, finds a room in an eclectic boarding house filled with lost souls, and stumbles into the only career for which his service trained him stocking crates of junk merchandise at the local big-box store.
Alpha Mike Foxtrot John L Sheppard 9780984422364 Books
Joe is a partially-disabled veteran who has just been medically discharged from the Army, after a hellish second tour in Iraq. He hitchhikes to Chicago, meets a girl, and begins working at a big box Best Buy knockoff retail chain. That's the plot in a nutshell, but it barely begins to do justice to this novel. This is a book about family, about mental illness, childhood, and war. In short, like all great books, it defies easy summary or analysis. Most of what Sheppard has written up until this time has been good, but this is a masterpiece. The writing has a style reminiscent of John Fante's best, the prose lines moving with the heady recklessness of a gambler who doesn't qualify himself or explain, but explodes from one sentence to the next. And for once, we get a nuanced view of PTSD as something that doesn't turn one into a psychopathic killer, or into a vegetable, but rather into someone who must learn to adapt to their new-found problems in the workaday world.The humor is there, as in Sheppard's earlier works, but there is something new, deeply profound and human taking shape in this novel. If you've ever lost a loved one, been to war, been married, or had parents-in short, if you've ever been human- it is hard for this book not to reach you on some level. As a previous reviewer said, you will be sorting this one out for awhile, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
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Tags : Alpha Mike Foxtrot [John L. Sheppard] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <span>The book is a great black-humored capture of the culture of the mid-00s, a Midwest full of oversized SUVs with yellow ribbon magnets on the back,John L. Sheppard,Alpha Mike Foxtrot,Paragraph Line Books,0984422366,FICTION War & Military
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Alpha Mike Foxtrot John L Sheppard 9780984422364 Books Reviews
I'm still trying to collect my thoughts on what I think of this book. It strikes a cord and the echoes of that don't quiet right away. I just keep turning it over and over in my mind. I can say for sure that it seems very unlike most of the other books I've read where a character returns to civilian life from the military. The protagonist, of course, has been through terrible things in the military. However, returning home isn't like what you might expect, particularly since he'd joined the military in the first place to run from an abandoning father, a mentally ill twin, a mother who glossed over it all, and that sort of thing. Instead of going back to all that, he walks off from the military in the same way that he walked away from his broken family. He winds up somewhere, falls for a girl (who is with someone else), and gets a crap job...things that seem all right when compared to the things he's left behind. He keeps going from there, living. A lot of what he experiences is reported in a matter of fact kind of way, like he is numbed by everything. However, this isn't actually the case and no matter how much he tries to keep it all pushed down, his emotion bursts forth from time to time (both for him and the reader) like the shrapnel fragments still buried in his skin. I'm still sorting out what all I feel about the book, but it's sticking with me. I think it'll stick with a lot of people.
Joe is a partially-disabled veteran who has just been medically discharged from the Army, after a hellish second tour in Iraq. He hitchhikes to Chicago, meets a girl, and begins working at a big box Best Buy knockoff retail chain. That's the plot in a nutshell, but it barely begins to do justice to this novel. This is a book about family, about mental illness, childhood, and war. In short, like all great books, it defies easy summary or analysis. Most of what Sheppard has written up until this time has been good, but this is a masterpiece. The writing has a style reminiscent of John Fante's best, the prose lines moving with the heady recklessness of a gambler who doesn't qualify himself or explain, but explodes from one sentence to the next. And for once, we get a nuanced view of PTSD as something that doesn't turn one into a psychopathic killer, or into a vegetable, but rather into someone who must learn to adapt to their new-found problems in the workaday world.
The humor is there, as in Sheppard's earlier works, but there is something new, deeply profound and human taking shape in this novel. If you've ever lost a loved one, been to war, been married, or had parents-in short, if you've ever been human- it is hard for this book not to reach you on some level. As a previous reviewer said, you will be sorting this one out for awhile, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
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