Customer Reviews

The Bullet Collection

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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.

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

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.

Ms. Ward's prose is haunting, beautiful and heart breaking in it simplicity and power. The descriptive passages about Lebanon and the war are exquisite. The characters, apart from the narrator, never fully come to life and remain very two dimensional. The novel does not stand as a cohesive work despite the obvious talent of the author and her beautiful prose.

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.

Told by Marianna, a young woman who has lost all sense of "home" as a result of the more than ten years of warfare she experienced in her homeland of Lebanon, this impressionistic psychological novel begins with her dreams of "before the war was real." Romantic images of her mother "wander[ing] outside, smelling the ghostly jasmine in the dark, and Daddy open[ing] another old book under a lamp" overlap with images of her grandparents lighting the candles on a Christmas tree while sweet wine boils on the stove. Now the war is "real," however. Years have passed, and the old reality she yearns for remains only in her dreams. Marianna, now eighteen, is in another place, America, her father's birthplace, where, she believes, "nothing can be beautiful" and where she looks "inward to the night, to my dream self who had promised that this time I really had gone back home to my true life."

Focusing almost exclusively on the four people in this family, on their friends, on those who died in the war (1975 - 1990), and on Lebanon itself, author Patricia Sarrafian Ward recreates the psychological damage which the war in Lebanon has created for all. Herself an exile who arrived in the US from Lebanon at the age of eighteen, the author provides vivid images of Marianna, the speaker, trying to cope, first, with her older sister Alaine's dramatic and emotional psychological escapes from the war and then with her own traumas as they both lose the very underpinnings of their lives. Neither parent seems to know what to do with their troubled daughters, hoping, apparently, that time and family love will effect cures. Through flashbacks, their lives in Lebanon unfold. Alaine, the older daughter, picks up bullets, shrapnel, and the other detritus of war, and she sneaks out at night, runs away periodically, and becomes sexually precocious. She cuts herself. Marianna, sometimes assigned to watch her older sister so she will not run away, seems to have a greater sense of stability, but she, too, eventually shows some of the same signs.

Some of the specifics of the war do intrude briefly into the narrative, though the focus is almost exclusively on this family, and as the time frame moves back and forth, and even slips into dreams and fantasies, it is often difficult to establish a historical chronology of the war. The story, though complex in its time frame, is relatively simple in its prose style, with lovely lyrical descriptions of nature and the changing seasons, alternating with short, sometimes abrupt, sentences propelling the action along as Marianna tries to process what is happening in her world.

The novel is somewhat monochromatic, however, with Alaine and Marianna representing the primary focus, and there were times that I longed for a moment of humor or change in tone. The girls' lack of overall perspective on the action, due to their youth, may be partly responsible for this, and it may also explain the depiction of their parents as seemingly ineffective and even indifferent as the crises evolve. A few signs of hope arise in the conclusion, leaving the reader to hope that the novel is not as autobiographical as it sometimes feels. Mary Whipple

Readers will feel nourished by the exquisite prose of this novel!

The Bullet Collection is an incredibly moving story set during the Lebanese civil war. The narrative chronicles the persistant influence the war has on a loving family.

If you've ever wondered what it's like to be a civilian in a city at war, this is the book for you!