Customer Reviews

Life in the Air Ocean: Stories

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Sylvia Foley's Life in the Air Ocean is a quick read in that it grabs you and won't let go. But layered and exact observations about the inner life and its consequent actions reward the careful reader. Her precise, beautiful writing captures the moments across years that make up a family history -- not the public one, but a private, under-the-skin history.

This book is outstanding. A collection of stories, it reads more like a novel. Ruth, who might be referred to as the main character, is a survivor. But what makes her different, what makes her compelling, is the complexity of her responses to pain. Unwilling to let those who hurt her control her, she takes her own pain hostage, showing it, as it were, who is in charge.

These stories are not about victimization; they are about the high price of rejecting the idea of victimization. Ruth gets hurt, yes. But her responses to pain are the responses of an organism. Her survival -- and indeed this is precisely what it is -- is survival in the most Darwinian terms: Ruth survives by adapting -- not by running away.

There is triumph here, redemption in Ruth's fear of fear. This book is not so much a book to be read as a book to keep on reading.