![]() ![]() It is the kind of harrowing moment of reckoning that unites Cupolo’s characters, moving forward through life’s grimness and discovering some grace along the way, though the search is long. Alina is helping to raise Sammy, but feels unable to “get past her anger and open her heart to let love flow to the child.” One day she has an embarrassing, violent altercation with Darrell and comes home to her affable German boyfriend showering her grandson with the attention he needs. In the title story, Alina finds herself stalking a drug dealer named Darrell, the father of her grandson, Sammy, and destroyer of her daughter’s life. “We’re trying to show them,” the son says to his father while eating ugali, Kenyan porridge, with his hands, “that they can choose a different way.” The son has a new family, a community of impoverished Kenyan women to whom he preaches that fate can be thwarted, a fact he knows because he escaped his old life. In “Long Division,” an absent father and retired businessman in America must accept that his adult son, whom he has traveled to Kenya to “track down” and retrieve, wants nothing to do with him. In “You’re Here Now,” the illegitimate daughter of a man who’s just died in a car accident awkwardly and hopelessly tries to connect with her half siblings at the funeral, against her mother’s wishes. Some characters pay dearly for the poor life choices they make, while others suffer for someone else’s transgressions - a parent’s, a child’s, a lover’s. but the struggles within are less “exotic” than familial, and painfully human. ![]() The stories traverse the world, leaping from a small Greek village to Alberta, Canada Mombasa, Kenya, to Catalina Island, Calif. Many of the characters in Lisa Cupolo’s debut collection, HAVE MERCY ON US (Regal House, 117 pp., paperback, $17.95), are away from home and even those not traveling seem somehow adrift. ![]()
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