Keeping Watch

Rating:
Summary: Thoughtprovoking
Review: If I were as good a writer as Laurie King, I would have the right words at my fingertips to do this novel justice. The book is still resonating in my mind a week after I finished reading it. The book is really two-in-one, and neither is easy to swallow. The images of Vietnam are not new to me, but they were told in a way that put me there, and I was as glad as Allen to leave the country. The second part is about redemption -- how to save yourself through the search for it, and the final accomplishment. Many of my generation treated the returning vets in deplorable ways. I would hope that this book would remind them. It was a no-win situation for everyone. To read of someone who managed to overcome his demons, and the way it which he did it, was fascinating. One reviewer said for a reader to stick with it. I second this and add that the rewards will astound you. We do not pay enough attention to the abuse of children. I believe that we all MUST be our brother's keeper. Great book, Laurie King.

Rating:
Summary: A REMARKABLE ACHIEVEMENT
Review: KEEPING WATCH is a remarkable achievement. Laurie King intertwines a first-rate story of war in Vietnam with a contemporary suspense story about rescuing a twelve-year old from his abusive father. Both stories gain harmonic richness from their conjunction. This reader was utterly enmeshed in the complexity of thier gradual unfolding.

Allen Carmichael returns from Vietnam haunted by terrible memories and nightmares. After seven years of wandering in a wilerness of alcohol, memory gaps, and petty crime he rurns home to Washinton's San Juan Islands to begin reconstructing himself. He spends the next two decades rescuing abused women and children for an underground network run by a woman named Alice. He has finally decided to retire and marry his lover, Rae Newborn (central figure of King's last novel FOLLY), but Alice persuades him to take one last case. It turns out to be the most challenging in his career, threatening the network and the lives of Allen and Jamie -- the boy he is trying to save.

King has never written a book with a male protagonist before. The most vivd sections of the book are Carmichael's flashbacks of Vietnam. King credits "the stories" of Vietnam vets in helping her accomplish this feat. It is a measure of King's skill that those scenes have the flavor of first-hand observation. The suspense story has enough twists and turns to satisfy the most jaded mystery reader.
Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: A REMARKABLE ACHIEVEMENT
Review: KEEPING WATCH is a remarkable achievement. Laurie King intertwines a first-rate story of war in Vietnam with a contemporary suspense story about rescuing a twelve-year old from his abusive father. Both stories gain harmonic richness from their conjunction. This reader was utterly enmeshed in the complexity of thier gradual unfolding.

Allen Carmichael returns from Vietnam haunted by terrible memories and nightmares. After seven years of wandering in a wilerness of alcohol, memory gaps, and petty crime he rurns home to Washinton's San Juan Islands to begin reconstructing himself. He spends the next two decades rescuing abused women and children for an underground network run by a woman named Alice. He has finally decided to retire and marry his lover, Rae Newborn (central figure of King's last novel FOLLY), but Alice persuades him to take one last case. It turns out to be the most challenging in his career, threatening the network and the lives of Allen and Jamie -- the boy he is trying to save.

King has never written a book with a male protagonist before. The most vivd sections of the book are Carmichael's flashbacks of Vietnam. King credits "the stories" of Vietnam vets in helping her accomplish this feat. It is a measure of King's skill that those scenes have the flavor of first-hand observation. The suspense story has enough twists and turns to satisfy the most jaded mystery reader.
Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Laurie King Treats Her Many Fans to an Excellent Read
Review: Laurie King has gained herself an enthusiastic new fan. If all of her books are as well crafted as KEEPING WATCH, I'll be digging through library shelves to find every one.

To start, Ms. King gives us a glimpse into Vietnam veteran Allen Carmichael's life now, then takes us deep into his past to show us what formed the man he has become. The tour of duty the naïve young student signed on for in 1967 changed nearly everything about him. Most of the first 90 pages are devoted to the business of war and the shaping of a soldier, Allen Carmichael in particular. Putting aside my personal feelings about war --- and that war in particular --- I found myself fascinated by the sights, sounds, smells and emotions Ms. King's descriptions evoked. The jungle grew to life on her pages and her hero, questionable though he sometimes might be, was catapulted from a patriotic college kid into an adult with keen abilities no parent wants their child to possess, let alone sharpen. But that's how Allen survived.

Once back Stateside, he tried to fit into a society that held wildly divergent views on its Vietnam veterans. As we know, their homecoming wasn't the grand welcome of a country's bravest and most devoted citizens. In the year he'd been gone, much had changed --- a lot of it inside himself. So when he tried to pick up where he had left off --- with college, with women, with career plans --- he struggled to find relevance in his choices. What Allen finally fell into, while admittedly illegal, was nonetheless noble and had the added benefit of helping him make amends for the horror that was Vietnam.

Allen Carmichael rescues abused women and children. He spent two and a half decades building a network of sensors, helpers, facilitators and foster homes, learning how to gather evidence and when to bring the authorities into the case. Now the time has come for him to retire. His last rescue, that of 12-year-old Jameson Patrick O'Connell, should have been routine. However, it's anything but. He watches Jameson (Jamie) at home, researches his father --- a widower who is quite well off --- and gets a feel for Jamie among his classmates. What Allen sees of Jamie's relationship with his father pushes him to a hasty acceleration of his normal timetable.

Jamie's new life starts out smoothly enough, but then Allen receives a letter from the foster family, which makes the hairs on his neck stand on end. The prickles of doubt send him scurrying to retrace his steps and dig deeper into the O'Connell family background. In the course of his second investigation, he finds that things aren't what they at first appeared. Now, he has to decide whether he has misjudged young Jamie and how the father really fits into the picture. When the elder O'Connell's plane goes missing, Allen wrenches Jamie from his new life and tries to fit the pieces of the puzzle into a sensible scenario. It is relentless action from that point on.

This is a sobering look at abuse --- psychological and physical --- and a quick peek at an ill-managed war. Today, while we are in the midst of another military conflict with less-than-worldwide support, KEEPING WATCH seems particularly timely. It gives us insights into the soldier's world that, hopefully, will help us understand and honor our troops as they come home. More importantly, maybe it will give us a heightened sense of the damage any type of abuse inflicts on people --- children especially --- and help us stamp it out before it ruins more lives. Of course, while gaining these valuable insights, we're treated to an excellent read. Just excellent.

--- Reviewed by Kate Ayers

Rating:
Summary: Well written but ultimately disappointing
Review: One of my favorite books of all time is Laurie King's first novel, A GRAVE TALENT. In a sense it is ironic that a supremely talented writer like Ms. King with many other distinguished books under her belt has not yet written a book to outdo her very first effort. With every book that she writes I hope for something to outdo the first effort. With the much heralded KEEPING TOUCH, I thought she might have finally done it. It sounded like she has written her true masterpiece at last. In fact, as I read the first hundred pages I thought that might finally be the case. However, she simply did not know how to keep her work down to a manageable length and unfortunately it does not live up to her first book.
Allen Carmichael has returned from Vietnam a psychological mess. It takes him quite some time to pull himself together. When the smoke clears he finds himself in a job in which he kidnaps children from abusive relationships and relocates them elsewhere in a safer and more supportive environment. Jamie is severely abused physically and mentally from his father. After removing him from the situation, Allen notes the father might be onto them thereby placing both Jamie and his foster family in danger. Allen must try to discover the truth about Jamie's father before it is too late.
A very promising start in this novel filled with harrowing scenes in Vietnam leads to a disappointing and trying conclusion. The novel goes on at least a hundred pages too long. All the strengths of Ms. King's work is here- the impeccably created characters, the riveting passages, the vivid descriptions of the locale and the intelligent subplots. However, the pacing lags and the length suffers as a result. A potential classic that simply could not maintain the high level consistently throughout.

Rating:
Summary: King's best book yet!
Review: Since there are already several glowing and wonderfully written reviews here, I will keep mine short and sweet. This is Laurie R. King's best book yet and that is saying a lot given the excellent caliber of her other work. Her descriptions of Vietnam affected me more than any others I have read and her presentation of a horribly abused boy is both restrained and heartbreaking.

I do think the ending is wrapped up a little too neatly, but that is really nitpicking. You don't need to be a mystery buff to enjoy this book, just someone who enjoys a good read.

Rating:
Summary: King's best book yet!
Review: Since there are already several glowing and wonderfully written reviews here, I will keep mine short and sweet. This is Laurie R. King's best book yet and that is saying a lot given the excellent caliber of her other work. Her descriptions of Vietnam affected me more than any others I have read and her presentation of a horribly abused boy is both restrained and heartbreaking.

I do think the ending is wrapped up a little too neatly, but that is really nitpicking. You don't need to be a mystery buff to enjoy this book, just someone who enjoys a good read.

Rating:
Summary: ... a timely work
Review: This Laurie King book provides a great analogy of the Vietnam war and makes it clear why thirty years later it matters that Kerry served in Vietnam and Bush didn't. I understand (academically only, thank you Lord) that all war is hell, but Vietnam was, I think, a special brand of hell. I don't know as much about it, but I think in some ways it is more akin to the experience of World War I vets. It was simply constant hell with no clear end in sight. Add to that the Vietnam experience of unpredictability, or worse, the predictability of the unthinkable every time you entered the jungle, and you have a group of people forever changed.
Our boys, and they were mostly boys, spent a year or more in times of pure terror... much as do children of abuse. It marks them. It never leaves their experience. At some point, they choose to become the abuser themselves, to numb themselves in whatever way they can or to be something even greater than they would have been without the abuse. But the abuse is always there. It is a daily part of their experience. It is their history and part of who they are.
Our men and women came back from Vietnam to shame. I never made the connection personally of bad war equals bad soldiers, but my culture certainly did. My experience with Vietnam was an 18 year old boy who was lonely enough to write back and forth to a middle school aged girl.. who shockingly told of drinking beer with his buddys to a conservatively raised Southern Baptist, but who never spoke of the realities of his time in the bush, except to mention that he was coming out of it or going back into it. Until the day my letters began to come back to me, the final one with a date on it. I can still feel the 13 year old disbelief and denial. That couldn't mean what I thought it did.
Many soldiers (most) suffer from what we now call post traumatic stress disorder (as do most children of child abuse). It seems to have been worse for our Vietnam vets. Whether it is because of their unwelcoming homecoming or because of what they lived through can probably not be determined. I would say both. But we still have homeless Vietnam vets, Vietnam vets in prison and others who are more quietly destructive both to themselves and others. Because we as human beings cannot participate in such violence without being damaged. It is an important wisdom.
And if our soldiers came back with irreparable scars, what of the children of Vietnam. What of the children who grew up abused by war in a way that makes them almost unrecognizable as children... can't be trusted, not to bite.... What of the children of domestic abuse?
This is King's analogy. She weaves a story of a Vietnam vet who returns with memories no one should have, who cannot shed the role of soldier, who after years of self destruction finds a way to channel those jungle skills in the rescue of children from abusive situations. It is a dark and provocative book. It brings our soul back to a forgotten war and opens our eyes to a present one. It is art at its finest.

Rating:
Summary: O.K. read
Review: Too difficult to follow, too obvious, and too full of stereotypes. Get from your library.

Rating:
Summary: O.K. read
Review: Too difficult to follow, too obvious, and too full of stereotypes. Get from your library.