{"id":19266,"date":"2012-12-24T10:10:10","date_gmt":"2012-12-24T15:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookdragon.si.edu\/?p=19266"},"modified":"2014-05-11T21:17:23","modified_gmt":"2014-05-12T01:17:23","slug":"astray-by-emma-donoghue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/astray-by-emma-donoghue\/","title":{"rendered":"Astray by Emma Donoghue"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Astray\"<\/a>Maybe it’s the craziness of the season, but I’ve really been appreciating short story collections. This latest title from\u00a0Emma Donoghue<\/a>\u00a0\u2013\u00a0the author of the phenomenal\u00a0Room<\/i><\/a> \u2013 is an intriguingly composed compilation: Donoghue presents a story introduced with a specific city and year, then gives the ‘ripped-from-the-headlines’ historical background that both explains and enhances her fictionalized narrative. Each is part of a centuries-old immigration journey, grouped together in three sections: “Departures,” “In Transit,” and “Arrivals and Aftermaths,” and in the final\u00a0“Afterword,” Donoghue\u00a0\u2013\u00a0herself Irish-born, British PhDed, currently Canada-domiciled \u2013\u00a0explains “why, on and off, for the last decade and a half, I’ve been writing stories about travels to, within, and occasionally from the United States and Canada.” [If you choose the audible version, you’ll get a full cast of effective narrators, but the best reward comes at the end when you get to hear Donoghue herself read the “Afterword” \u2013 that leftover lilt is just soooo inviting.]\n

Like Donoghue who has “gone stray, stepped off some invisible track [she] was meant to follow,” her characters begin in one place and are driven out, run away, move to, or search out somewhere else. In “Man and Boy,” two “self-made prodigies” are willing to accept “[w]hatever Barnum offers” \u2013 yes, as in P.T.\u00a0\u2013 and\u00a0prepare to sail from London in 1882 across the Atlantic toward waiting audiences. A young woman living in 1854 London in dire circumstances in “Onward” finds a surprising benefactor (I hope you\u2019ll be as tickled as I was to learn his identity!) who offers the\u00a0possibility\u00a0of a reinvented life in the new world. In “Last Supper at Brown’s,” a slave and his missus flee 1864 Texas, leaving the master “facedown in the okra” (not my favorite veggie, either!).<\/p>\n

In “Counting the Days,” plans for reunion between a waiting husband in Canada\u00a0and his Irish wife and young children are tragically thwarted. A lawless woman of the Wild West captures a wayward prospector, and acting as her own “judge and jury,” decides to return him to his family with a few adventures along the way in “The Long Way Home.” In “The Gift,” a destitute new mother gives up her daughter in 1877 and spends the rest of her life trying to reclaim her. The private lives of a 1639 Cape Cod community are transgressively revealed, then recanted in “The Lost Seed.” And, in my personal favorite, \u201cDaddy\u2019s Girl,\u201d a young woman learns the true identity of her father only upon his death.<\/p>\n

Harnessing her own searching spirit, Donoghue ventures through centuries and continents, across oceans and cultures, to present a unique collection of peripatetic characters, each ready to confront, challenge, or flee what life presents next. Be assured: Going rogue never read this good.<\/p>\n

Readers<\/strong>: Adult<\/p>\n

Published<\/strong>: 2012<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maybe it’s the craziness of the season, but I’ve really been appreciating short story collections. This latest title from\u00a0Emma Donoghue\u00a0\u2013\u00a0the author of the phenomenal\u00a0Room \u2013 is an intriguingly composed compilation: Donoghue presents a story introduced with a specific city and year, then gives the ‘ripped-from-the-headlines’…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26885,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,81,274,6,358,60,7],"tags":[89,83,1788,6608,1136,1789,10,11,25,1790,1791,13,1792,1793],"class_list":["post-19266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adult-readers","category-audio","category-canadian","category-fiction","category-irish","category-nonethnic-specific","category-short-stories","tag-anthology-collection","tag-assimilation","tag-astray","tag-bookdragon","tag-dion-graham","tag-emma-donoghue","tag-family","tag-friendship","tag-immigration","tag-james-langton","tag-khristine-hvam","tag-love","tag-robert-petkoff","tag-suzanne-toren"],"yoast_head":"\nAstray by Emma Donoghue - BookDragon<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/astray-by-emma-donoghue\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Astray by Emma Donoghue - BookDragon\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Maybe it’s the craziness of the season, but I’ve really been appreciating short story collections. This latest title from\u00a0Emma Donoghue\u00a0\u2013\u00a0the author of the phenomenal\u00a0Room \u2013 is an intriguingly composed compilation: Donoghue presents a story introduced with a specific city and year, then gives the ‘ripped-from-the-headlines’...\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/astray-by-emma-donoghue\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"BookDragon\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2012-12-24T15:10:10+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2014-05-12T01:17:23+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/10\/2012\/12\/Astray.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"948\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1429\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@SmithsonianAPA\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"2 minutes\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Astray by Emma Donoghue - BookDragon","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/astray-by-emma-donoghue\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Astray by Emma Donoghue - BookDragon","og_description":"Maybe it’s the craziness of the season, but I’ve really been appreciating short story collections. 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