RaveThe Southern Review of Books... works on many levels. It is a poignant attempt to understand the author’s mother, who left her and her sister when they were young children and only intermittently showed up in their lives. It is also a portrait of modern reservation life as Geller returns to her mother’s childhood home in the Navajo Nation to meet her estranged family. It is also a story of addiction and the toll it exacts on generations of a family. Geller deftly weaves these narratives and more into a work of art that is at once painful and triumphant ... The cyclical nature of all life permeates the work and creates a rhythm that infuses the story with energy. This is not to imply that it always creates a positive energy — much of the book is grim, documenting whole lifetimes of extraordinary hardship. The drumbeat of life destroying and then recreating itself opens up a strange vein of hope that imbues the work with a sense of resurrection. There is perhaps no more powerful cycle that fuels Dog Flowers than the brutal constancy of addiction and, at times, momentary recovery ... masterful.
David Zucchino
RaveSouthern Review of Books...brilliant ... Through painstaking, well-documented research, Zucchino — a Pulitzer-prize winning reporter — revisits the Wilmington insurrection of 1898 ... What flowed from New Bern down the coast to Wilmington was an election-year chaos that Zucchino brings to vividly terrifying light through the real lives of the people affected ... Zucchino reports his way through the action and the personal stories with great care ... Through this act of documenting, he brings truth to the lie.
