Customer Reviews

Songs of Innocence

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Reviewed by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, award-winning author of "This is the Place" and "Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered"

Is a poem by any other name truly a poem?

Tim Miller has written a book about childhood that sent chills down my back from the first moment: "They chased each other through a field just as the clouds hunted one another above; they hid among the whisperingweeds and crouched beneath the thick sheets of unforgiving steel..."

If a reader can embrace Dostoyevsky's quote, "You must know that there is nothing higher, or stronger, or sounder, or more useful afterwards in life, than some good memory, especially a memory from childhood," then it is definitely hers to hold in her hand and in her heart.

Songs of Innocence tells short stories (are they stories?) that will make you laugh or cry as surely as if they were full-length movies or a novel of that lives through the ages. Each piece of truth (fiction is it? or truth?) is numbered. The intimate horror of Number 95 is worth the cost of this small volume, enough to shame us, make the best of us think about what it is that we do, think, and pray for in this world.

Number 4 is simply a quote from Baudelaire: "Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will." Need I say more?

(Carolyn Howard-Johnson is the award-winning author of This is the Place and Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered.