Digging to Indochina

By Connie Biewald

Book Overview

Seventeen-year-old Ivy MacKenzie is consumed by bitterness over the tragic death of her Vietnam veteran father. Desperate to break free of a family that doesn't understand her and a small town that suffocates her, Ivy runs away with Gil Thompson-a stranger who shows her a passion she's never known and a violent danger she never saw coming. Ivy's younger brother Bryan has a tender heart, conflicting memories, and a fierce loyalty to his family. Their disengaged, high-strung mother Carol parents as best she knows how while coping with her own lingering heartbreak and entering into a new relationship.

Though their voices and struggles are their own, each of the MacKenzies grapples with loss and disappointment and yearns for love and belonging. Together, they come of age and come to terms with the ways that memories and dreams can blur reality; they learn what it means to embrace family, flaws and all; and they discover how digging to Indochina can help them find their way home.

"Biewald's writing probes and sifts the buried storage vaults of family relationships with an archaeologist's precision."-Lois Lowry, creator of the popular Anastasia Krupnik series and two-time recipient of the Newbery Medal for her books The Giver and Number the Stars

"An always interesting, authentic story about the next generation, the children of Vietnam veterans-children who dig, not to China, but to Indochina. A good solid read."
-Grace Paley, author of The Little Disturbances of Man, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, and Later the Same Day

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1583485465
• ISBN13: 9781583485460
• Release Date: July 2006
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Length: 252 Pages
• Weight: 0.82 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

An immensely perceptive novel that truly resonates on many emotional levels

From the metaphorical richness of the title to the evocatively human portraits of the main characters, Digging to Indochina is a living, breathing evocation of the struggles, mistakes, and doubts that define a family dealing with loss, love, hope, and just about every emotion that alternately tears people apart and brings them back together. Author Connie Biewald captures the social dynamics of family life in the most realistic, palpable of ways. This story, and the feelings and behaviors of its main characters, are remarkably easy to relate to, especially to those whose families have dealt with some of the same kinds of emotional ups and downs. The story captures life in almost all of its facets: life, death, love, hate, fear, alienation, support, etc. - and from multiple viewpoints. In my opinion, it's a masterfully crafted novel. Like many a young, rebellious teenager, 17-year-old Ivy McKenzie makes some serious mistakes and eventually becomes emotionally and physically trapped by her bad choices, hamstrung by pride and shame from making things right with her family. She remains Daddy's little girl long after the premature death of her father, withdrawing from her mother more and more, haunting the house with her father's troubled spirit and desperately seeking escape from her small-town life. So it is that, when a young stranger named Gil offers to take her away to Florida, she jumps at the chance to leave home and live her own life far away from her mother and her brother Bryan. Not surprisingly, Gil is bad news from the start, expressing his "love" for Ivy with physical abuse. She eventually leaves him, trying to start a new life on her own, but she ultimately swallows her pride and goes home - several months pregnant. Major changes have taken place in her absence. It wasn't easy for her mother Carol to deal with her wayward daughter's flight - all those months not knowing if she were dead or alive. Bryan was unable to help her deal with her pain, although he was always there for her - just as he always had been. It took an outsider to lift Carol from her doldrums, a man who now greets Ivy as her new step-father. Between Carol's new marriage and Bryan's first girlfriend, a self-alienated Ivy retreats further within herself, worried about the baby, worried that Gil will come for her, worried that Gil won't come for her, etc. Tragedy soon rears its ugly head again in some dramatic ways, leaving emotional bridges destroyed as quickly as their foundations had begun to be laid. It's an emotionally intense story that really takes us inside the hearts and mind of all the major characters. Living together under one roof doesn't make a family. Connie Biewald shows us just how hard it can be to turn a house into a home, overcoming deeply entrenched emotions to rebuild dysfunctional relationships. Every character makes mistakes, struggles to let go of the past, and says and does things he/she regrets - and for all the classic reason

A Family's Tragedies Remain Unfocused

Connie Biewald is a very fine writer. She is skilled in drawing characters, situations that are palpably realistic, and in pulling off dialogue that is cogent, poignant, and beautifully crafted. She successfully relates the disintegration of a small family unable to move out of each member's self to find the greater goal of belonging and knows well how to describe the most lurid conditions of life gone wrong. Why, then, does her novel DIGGING TO INDOCHINA not ultimately succeed? For this reader the problem begins with the title. We are introduced to the fact that the MacKenzie family's problems all relate to the important loss of the father figure Johnny, a Vietnam veteran who managed to survive the hell of the war only to return home an alcoholic and die an accidental death, leaving behind a wife Carol, a devoted daughter Ivy, and an emotionally isolated son Bryan. Had Biewald kept this focus of the emotionally destroyed Vietnam veteran and the aftershock of the war central to her story, then this novel would have been cohesive and far more significant. Instead what we have is yet another pulp fiction type dysfunctional family: Ivy plays pool, is seduced by smarmy Gil, runs away from the home that is not conducive to love, becomes pregnant by her abusive boyfriend, returns home to a mother who finally remarries a shop teacher Neal from high school and to a brother who still can't figure out what he wants in life outside of his harmonica and guitar. Both mother and daughter are simultaneously pregnant: Ivy's son Mac is born and Carol's daughter is stillborn. Gil returns after a year in jail and causes yet more turmoil than while he was away. And the only one who really alters the family is new husband/stepfather Neal, a man who is able to pull together the fragments of three lives disjointed by disappointment and failure and help them find the importance of forgiving and belonging. The title would indicate that the family dissolution was due to the loss of the father, home from his tour in Indochina. 'You had Bryan and me digging all day long. To Indochina. You promised us all the fortune cookies we could eat once we got there. And tigers. You said we'd see tigers and water buffalo and rice paddies. We'd wear big straw hats and walk barefoot.' And later in the book 'She wanted to run. She remembered how she'd run to the yard when her mother told her her dad had died, to the hole in the dirt. She hadn't made it to Indochina then. Now the hole was filled in.' Moments like this reference an event that was never developed sufficiently in the novel to really make us care about that degree of loss. And that is where Biewald loses us: we willingly and with trust in her talent read on, expecting to care about these characters. But there is little to redeem any of them. We are simply left with the knowledge that Connie Biewald is a fine craftsman as a writer - and only hope her gifts result in a book more closely accessible to our hear