Scrap: Salvaging a Family: A Memoir in Flash

by Luanne Castle

“…a powerful, painful family saga that slowly gives way to hard-won understanding. A richly detailed, harrowing account of household mayhem and the struggle to forgive.”

—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

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“Spare, precise, and quietly devastating, this is the kind of memoir that stays in the body long after the reading is done.”

—The Book Revue

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Luanne Castle’s new hybrid flash memoir, Scrap: Salvaging a Family (ELJ Editions 2026), is available to purchase on Amazon and ELJ Editions. Ebook only at ELJ Editions.

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Scrap: Salvaging a Family explores the stain of childhood fear and anxiety on the adult spirit and the experience of reconciling with an aging or dying parent. A daughter has grown up in a household with an angry and abusive father. He keeps the secret of his own biological father’s identity from his daughter for decades. Can this family be salvaged?

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PRAISE FOR ‘SCRAP: SALVAGING A FAMILY’
“…a powerful, painful family saga that slowly gives way to hard-won understanding. A richly detailed, harrowing account of household mayhem and the struggle to forgive.”

—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“This lyrical, beautifully imagistic work is both an exploration of the long roots of generational trauma and identity erasure and a vivid look back at growing up female in mid-century America.”

—Kathryn Kulpa, author of A Map of Lost Places

“Castle is a deft miniaturist–each story etched with a fine blade, yet a delicate touch. Scrap is a collection of constellations of the ordinary.”

—Robert Vaughan, Editor-in-Chief of Bending Genres, author of ASKEW.

“Told in brief, strikingly vivid fragments, and through various perspectives and forms, the book as a whole presents a deeply moving and unforgettable account. We readers are privileged to bear witness to this emotional excavation, one that ultimately reminds us that love is powerful even when it’s painful and that forgiveness is the only way forward“

—Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works

“A memoir in flash, ‘Scrap’ focuses on three discrete parts of Castle’s life in relation to her parents, especially her father. ‘Scrap’ is a multivalent word around whose every meaning and nuance Castle fashions poignant—and sometimes horrifying—flash prose and poetry to reveal her family in all its human pain, mystery, and love.”

—Wilma J. Kahn, Your Impossible Voice

Genres: Memoir

172 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2026

About the author

Luanne Castle’s hybrid flash memoir, Scrap: Salvaging a Family, is a finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. It earned a starred Kirkus review and is available from ELJ Editions. Her story, “Garden Seasons,” was selected for Best Microfiction 2026. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Copper Nickel, River Teeth, Your Impossible Voice, JMWW, Grist, Fourteen Hills, Verse Daily, Disappointed Housewife, Lunch Ticket, Saranac Review, Pleiades, Cleaver, Moon City, Moon Park, Anti-Heroin Chic, Bending Genres, BULL, The Mackinaw, The Ekphrastic Review, Phoebe, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Gone Lawn, Burningword, Superstition Review, One Art, Roi Fainéant, Dribble Drabble, Flash Boulevard, O:JA&L, Sheila-Na-Gig, Thimble, Antigonish Review, Longridge, Paragraph Planet, Six Sentences, Gooseberry Pie, Switch, and Ginosko. She has published four award-winning poetry collections. Her ekphrastic flash and poetry collection Hunting the Cosmos is forthcoming from Shanti Arts in fall 2026. Her mixed-media art has been showcased at Rogue Agent, Ink in Thirds, Watershed Review, Wildscape, Mad Swirl, Raw Lit, and Thimble. Luanne has been a Fellow at the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California, Riverside. She studied English and Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside (PhD); Western Michigan University (MFA); and Stanford University (Certificate). Luanne lives with her husband and three cats in Arizona along a wash that wildlife use as a thoroughfare. https://www.luannecastle.com/

Reviews

[Elizabeth Gauffreau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Luanne Castle’s memoir Scrap tells the story of one woman’s determination to come to terms with her troubled relationship with her abusive father. Underpinning the entire memoir are the courage and strength of character it took for her to carry out the painful work of salvaging her family.

Scrap is prefaced with a characterization of Castle’s father Rudy as a bastard, he and his two siblings born out-of-wedlock, the identity of their father kept secret. We are then introduced to Rudy in a two-stanza poem, “Scrap.” The first stanza shows Castle’s initial understanding of how the circumstances of his birth may have shaped him into the angry and abusive parent he became, while the second stanza expresses Castle’s need to find more scraps of his life and his mother’s life— and piece them together to form a whole.

By not knowing the story of her father’s family of origin, could Castle fully know her own story? One of the many questions this memoir raises in my mind is whether sons and daughters have a right to know everything about their parents’ prior lives, when the parents and the family intentionally keep some of these parts secret? Is the generational damage in the knowing or the not-knowing?

The memoir has been structured with intention and a high level of craft in its component parts.The three sections of Scrap follow the narrative arc of a three-act play: “Early Years” as set-up, “Therapy” as confrontation, and “Later Years” as resolution. Similarly, the mode of expression for each section is well-aligned with its content: flash for “Early Years,” interrogative dialog for “Therapy,” and narrative prose for “Years Later.” There are also poems to provide even more emotional depth in key places. Some of the flash pieces are “imaginings,” when Castle puts herself in Rudy’s and her beloved grandmother’s place as another step on the path to insight and understanding.

I experienced the “Early Years” section as a time of locked doors, confined spaces, monsters under the bed, and painful spankings. The fact that there were scraps of good times with her father only served to intensify the anxiety, the child never knowing when or why she would set him off. Castle deftly walks the line between the adult perspective of remembering an incident from childhood in an attempt to reconcile with it and the in-the-moment perspective of the child. The child’s emotions were as immediate and visceral as if I were inhabiting the scene with her. I had to pause periodically and take some deep breaths before continuing. From the child’s raw fear to the adolescent’s feeling that nothing is going to change, the sense of despair is palpable by the end of this section.

“Therapy” is the bridge section between the abuse Castle suffered and her relationship with Rudy after he revealed the secret of his birth and expressed remorse that he had been a bad father. The adult Castle acknowledges how painful her childhood was but insists that she has come through it just fine. Later Years” surprised me by the forgiveness and redemption expressed as Rudy aged and his health declined.

After reading this deeply moving memoir of anger, fear, forgiveness, and redemption, I would describe it using the metaphor of kintsugi, the Japanese practice of mending broken pottery by mixing gold powder into the adhesive, thereby creating beauty from brokenness.

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Luanne Castle’s powerful (and heart-wrenching) memoir is a true testament to grace and forgiveness. I particularly enjoyed the style of her book, written in short vignettes, which allowed me to quickly stop and ruminate about what I just read. A great read!

[S. Jeyran Main · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Scrap: Salvaging a Family, Luanne Castle delivers a deeply intimate and formally inventive hybrid flash memoir that examines the long shadow of childhood fear and the fragile, complicated path toward forgiveness.Structured in brief, lyrical flashes, the narrative mirrors the fragmented nature of memory itself. Castle pieces together moments—like scraps salvaged from a lifetime—to explore what it means to grow up under the weight of an angry and abusive father. The emotional atmosphere of the book is tense yet restrained; rather than sensationalizing pain, Castle allows it to surface quietly through reflection, image, and revelation.At the heart of the memoir lies a long-kept secret: the father’s concealed biological origins. When mortality forces truth into the open, the daughter’s understanding begins to shift. What unfolds is not an excuse for past harm, but a widening lens—an exploration of generational trauma, inherited silence, and the burdens parents carry long before their children are born.

One of the memoir’s greatest strengths is its refusal to simplify reconciliation. Forgiveness here is not sentimental. It is gradual, complicated, and earned through insight. As the daughter learns about her father’s early life and hidden history, empathy emerges—not as weakness, but as strength. The book becomes a meditation on how knowledge reshapes memory and how understanding can soften even deeply embedded wounds.

Castle’s prose is spare yet evocative. The flash form intensifies the emotional resonance, allowing each vignette to stand alone while contributing to a cohesive emotional arc. Readers who appreciate memoirs that experiment with structure while remaining grounded in emotional truth will find Scrap especially compelling.

This is a courageous, contemplative work about family, secrecy, and the possibility of grace at the end of life. It reminds us that while we cannot rewrite the past, we can reinterpret it—and sometimes that is enough to heal.

[Joy Kidney · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author's immigrant grandmother gave birth to three children, all illegitimate. Their birth father, a respected man by the community, had another legitimate family. One of the sons was the father of the author, an unpredictable, frightening, and sometimes violent man who often took out his rage on Luanne, his only daughter. What a complicated childhood, one without answers.

Those answers finally seeped out later in life, with both father and daughter attempting to make sense of the complicated scraps of their shared past. The author bravely gives glimpses of early years, therapy years, and later years with candor and compassion, and amazing resilience.

[Chelsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you Poetic Book Tour and Luanne Castle for the gifted review copy.

Scrap is a memoir in flash, told in vignettes from the author’s girlhood and then in her later years with the focus primarily on her father and her relationship with him. It is at times rather difficult to read but there are moments of levity and humor and overall I cherished this reading experience.

I love a memoir because you get precisely the story the author wants you to get. The book begins with the definition of the word “bastard” and on page 4 Castle writes “In my father’s case, it meant he could be a genuine and legitimate dick.”. Right off the bat the reader understands where we’re going with this story.

That being said, this story is so much more than a tale of what a dick Rudy was. Which, don’t get me wrong, he was. The stories of domestic violence and the fear and anxiety that permeated the family’s homelife throughout were truly horrifying. I really wonder how Castle managed to continue to have a relationship even as an adult when she no longer was living under his roof. She does list her reasons, several of which reference not wanting to upset anyone. But, she states, he also ends up being a great grandfather. And during the journey of discovering the identity of her father’s father she also comes to understand that he desperately did not want her to end up in a similar situation as his own mother did. He just went about showing that protectiveness in a really messed up way.

I cannot personally relate to Castle as far as my own upbringing goes, but I did find many similar parallels within my own family. Recently a family member discovered a previously unknown relative through DNA testing and oh boy, have I heard about a man not knowing how to raise a child because of some made up excuse. Stories like Castle’s are more relatable than we probably want to believe, making the telling of these stories so valuable and necessary.

Beyond the content of the story, Castle’s writing is beautiful. I love the “memoir in flash” style, each vignette is tight and succinct without an unnecessary word and yet they are so profound. I was really taken with her ability.

[Enakshi J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scrap: Salvaging a Family by Luanne Castle reads like memory in motion, flickering, uneven, and unexpectedly sharp. It doesn’t follow a neat path, and that’s exactly its strength. The line “We are formed by little scraps of wisdom” quietly anchors the book, while moments like “Anger and fear… overflow often” stay with you long after you’ve turned the page. There’s a lingering quality here, as if the narrative refuses to be neatly contained.

The fragmented, vignette style works remarkably well for the most part. It mirrors the emotional texture of trauma and childhood, where clarity comes in flashes rather than full scenes. Some passages are strikingly vivid, almost cinematic, and the emotional honesty never feels forced. There’s a restraint in the writing that makes the heavier moments land harder.

At the same time, the structure can feel a bit too elusive. Just as you begin to settle into a moment, it shifts, sometimes leaving an impression rather than a fully developed scene. A few sections feel like glimpses rather than complete experiences, which might leave some readers wanting more continuity.

Even so, the book holds its ground. It’s not always easy to read, but it feels sincere and quietly powerful. By the end, it suggests that healing is not about neat resolutions, but about gathering what fragments you can and learning to live with them.

[J. Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started this memoir, but I quickly became immersed in its style of storytelling. The format was a new one for me, and I applaud the author for her bravery, ability to love and forgive, and of course, her talent. Highly recommended!

[Ashley Kanazawich · Rating 4 out of 5]

I went into this book expecting poetry and found something much more layered.

Scrap: Salvaging a Family is written as a series of small, memory-like pieces that follow the author from childhood into adulthood. Each piece feels like a snapshot, and together they create a full picture of her life.

What stood out most to me is how convincingly she captures childhood perspective. It feels immediate and real, even though it is written from memory. As she grows older, she revisits certain moments and reframes them with a deeper understanding, which adds another layer to the reading experience.

This is not an easy book to read. There is abuse and emotional pain throughout, and some sections were difficult to sit with. At the same time, it is powerful to see how she grows and who she becomes.

The exploration of her relationship with her father later in life, especially as more of his story comes to light, adds a thoughtful and complex layer to the memoir.

I am really glad I read this. It is different, emotional, and very reflective.

[Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been looking forward to Luanne’s memoir for a long time. I was lucky to read early drafts of her memoir-in-progress twice, each time developing a deeper understanding of her complicated-uncomplicated* family life as well as a deeper appreciation of her mastery with words.

From the back cover, the reader is told that:
Scrap: Salvaging a Family is a hybrid flash memoir tracing the long shadow of childhood fear and the complexities of forgiving a dying parent. As a daughter uncovers her father’s painful origins, she begins to understand the man behind the anger–and reclaims pieces of herself in the process.

When Scrap first arrived in my mailbox and I (literally) tore open the packaging, I was struck by the beauty of the cover. While my main textile interest has always been knitting, I’ve been fascinated by collage, the taking of bits of memorabilia, letters and pictures from magazines, perhaps scraps of fabric, and affixing them in such a way that they tell a story. [Interestingly, my most vivid memory of making collage was in a support group I was co-facilitating for survivors of domestic violence. The collages made by that group were illuminating and empowering.]

Then there’s the format of Scrap, perhaps the most unusual format I’ve seen for a memoir. Luanne opens with three definitions of the word bastard and explains how each definition fits to Rudy, her father. It’s a tender but clear-eyed introduction to Rudy. With one definition:
For my father, born in 1928, bastard, a jagged blade, ripped his heart.

Yet, with another:
In my father’s case, it [bastard] meant he could be a genuine and legitimate dick.

Scrap is organized into parts, and each “chapter” within each part begins with the first several words in bold. Rarely does a chapter (or scene or section or whatever you want to call it) go longer than a page. Each flash in this memoir could stand on its own, and many of them have been published elsewhere. But you know the saying: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That’s Scrap.

*So what do I mean by “complicated-uncomplicated?” Early on in Scrap, we are introduced to Rudy’s “wolf teeth” and “wolf mask.” Later, we are horrified by bouts of his physical and emotional violence. And yet there are moments of tenderness, of love. And moments of Rudy’s pain and suffering that Luanne excavates for us. Luanne gives voice to her father’s own difficult childhood, his concerns for the starving children he came across while serving in Korea, his relationship with his grandchildren. Rudy is a complicated man but isn’t every man complicated? Isn’t every woman complicated? And don’t they become less complicated the more we understand them?

Of course, here, as usual, I’m thinking of my own complicated-uncomplicated childhood and family life where the key character is my mother. While she didn’t have wolf teeth, she had an icy sternness. Frost hung in the air when she gave me the silent treatment. That’s how I remember her as a child. My writing about her–although not in memoir as much as fiction–has made her less complicated and, thus, more human.

Like many memoirs, Scrap entices me to consider how I would write about my own life. The form that Luanne has chosen makes so much sense. It validates memory as a crazy quilt of remembrances. It allows us to imagine the voice and actions of our parents before we knew them. It brings together the bits and bobs of our lives, and lets them be what they are.

Very early in Scraps, when describing a memory of herself as very little, Luanne writes:
I will always be a creature of senses in that image. But I’m a big girl now, ready for school and full of narratives that dismantle themselves and intermingle their puzzle pieces so you can’t put the stories together with sense.

Oh, but these narratives and puzzle pieces do make sense, together and apart. With this hybrid of flashes, we as readers develop a more nuanced sense of Luanne’s childhood and her father than we would have through a traditional linear narrative. As writers, we are being shown another, perhaps more effective, way to tell our own stories.

[Amy Cohen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have you ever picked up a book, not knowing what to expect, and become so wrapped up in the story and the writing that you just don’t want to put it down? That was my experience reading Luanne Castle’s newest book Scrap: Salvaging a Family. From the first page until I finished it, I was spellbound.

Luanne has published four volumes of poetry and many poems and flash prose pieces1 in numerous publications, but I first encountered her writing through her genealogy blog, The Family Kalamazoo, and although Scrap is not about genealogy per se, it is about family history: how our parents and our grandparents and those before them all shape the people we become. In this memoir, we see how Luanne’s father was affected by his family history and how that in turn affected the author, his daughter.

The book is written in a series of short “flashes” of specific memories tied together into a revealing and heart-wrenching story of her relationship with her father, a man she both loved and feared. Her writing is clear and beautiful and although written in prose, the language is poetic. The images she creates are powerful and resonant.

Here are two examples, one showing how much she loved her father when she was a little girl, the second showing how much she feared him. Notice how she uses images of his arms in both, each image serving to evoke a specific emotion.

“A man throws his efforts into the project. A little girl, face like a cup, watched his Superman arms crank on the vise handle and tighten the grip. The girl is me, and the workbench, its surface scarred by hammer blows, belongs to the shoemaker’s elves that visit the man when I am asleep. He presides over the saw, aiming for the pencil line, sawdust falling away on each side as snow does from a plow. On the pegboard, pliers and screws line up by size like Goldilocks’ bears. I sit behind the man who is my father, the chilled concrete floor twanging my backside.”

In this second memory those arms she admired for their strength as she watched him work turn into something much more threatening.

“Daddy tickles me, and when I squirm away, giggling, he rolls me on the planked floor where we play wrestle. When I tickle him, he belly-shake laughs. When I don’t want to go to bed until it’s black outside, his joy dissolves fast and leaves an unpleasantness that charges to anger. I watch for the inside of his tanned arms. When I see the flash of their snake-white underbellies, I try to run. One of them catches me by the back of my shirt. The other pulls up my skirt and down my panties. Daddy raises that arm up above us before he smacks it down on my bottom.”

Those arms reappear many other times in Luanne’s memories, most often in ways that are threatening and angry. But I will leave it to you to read the book to see how the author’s story develops and how she learns to understand her father’s anger and where it comes from. I promise you that you will be moved to tears, some of grief, some of anger, and some of joy. There were even times I laughed. And there were many times that I sat back and re-read a page a few times over, marveling in the language, the depth of feeling, and the universality of some aspects of her story. Aren’t we all somewhat mystified by who our parents are and why they are the way they are? Luanne Castle had the courage to dig deeply enough to learn who her father was and why he was the way he was.

[Gwen Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve read many memoirs over the years, but I’d never encountered one written entirely in “flash” until now. Luanne Castle guides us through her early childhood, young womanhood, marriage, and later life in a series of brief, finely crafted vignettes as she tries to understand her relationship with her father. In my own memoir, I touch on my ambivalence about not having a father by writing, “he may have been both protector and tyrant in one, which would have been more frightening than having no father at all.” Castle’s book shows us, with startling clarity, what it is to be the daughter of exactly such a man.

There are moments of kindness. A cartoon of him changing her diaper hangs in his carpentry room, where he sets up a small workbench just for her. But his moods shift quickly, and when they do, the “wolf face” appears. His spankings are not just harsh—they exceed what was considered acceptable even in an era when corporal punishment was commonplace.

Worse still is the psychological fear he instills, which intensifies as Castle grows older and begins to date. Eventually she leaves home in haste. When she returns the next day, she opens the door to find a gun balanced on the kitchen table, its barrel pointed at her chest. It turns out to be a toy, but that hardly softens the moment.

At a recent gathering of women writers, we talked about the trauma we inherit from our parents. Do they keep their secrets believing they’re protecting us? And what happens when silence itself becomes the thing passed down—shame, insecurity, and confusion that were never ours to carry? Castle could easily have sat at that table with us. In her father’s final days, she learns the secret that shaped him: the shame of illegitimacy, and his fear that she might somehow repeat his mother’s “mistakes.”

Castle is a poet, and it shows. Her economy of language gives each memory fragment a sharp, bright edge. The brevity is almost a kindness—it lets the reader pause, breathe, and absorb what life must have felt like for the young girl who walked on eggshells.

Her father, never fathered himself and burdened by secrecy and shame, struggled to parent her and passed his pain along. That Castle ultimately reaches a kind of forgiveness speaks to her ability to hold complexity—to see the humanity he could show others, even while recognising how deeply flawed he was with her.

The title Scrap is beautifully chosen. Scraps run through the memoir: her grandmother’s quilts, her father’s sculptures made from discarded metal, and the fragments of memory, stories, photographs, and documents Castle gathers to piece together the truth of her family life.

[Michelle Stockard Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say about such a wonderful and poignant memoir, and so uniquely told through flash non-fiction? I do not read many memoirs. I would read more if they were written like this one. If I ever write one, you can be sure that I will approach in a similar way.

Luanne's relationship with her father was very complicated. My heart screamed for her as she related her experiences of bearing the brunt of his anger. This short snippet from page 76 expresses her experience in just a few sentences:

"I have never felt unloved. Hated, frightened, anxious, and claustrophobic, yes. But not unloved. I need to remember this every day. I'll make and tie a memory bracelet around my left wrist so I see it whenever I do anything."

This book speaks of generational trauma, and the psychological effects of a society that places stigma on certain realities such as being born out of wedlock, etc. When Rudy (Luanne's father) was born to an unmarried woman and given a last name that typically indicates being a "bastard." that stigma followed him his entire life and was where his anger stemmed from.

It was heartening to see that Luanne and Rudy had established a peace between them in later years. Though their relationship remained complicated, it was clear that love was always present, even if it was not always communicated effectively.

My mom is a memoir reader and I plan to pass this book to her. I know she will enjoy it, and she will also relate to an extent, as she had a complicated relationship with her father. She often speaks of dealing with his anger when she was growing up. Unfortunately, she never received the apology she should have, but my grandfather died suddenly so I'd like to think that it may have happened at some point. I know they did have a better relationship as he grew older, but it was reticent at best because they didn't really see each other often.

I thank Luanne for sharing her life with us readers. Reading this book was definitely an experience. I feel it will lead me to examine the relationship with my father, which has become complicated in adulthood due to circumstances I'll stay silent on for now.

I highly recommend this book. You'll be missing out if you don't read it.

[Heena Rathore Rathore-Pardeshi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scrap: Salvaging a Family by Luanne Castle is a fragmented, lyrical, and emotionally precise memoir that sifts through family memory, inherited shame, childhood fear, and the difficult work of understanding a parent without excusing the harm they caused. Written as a “memoir in flash,” the book is built out of short, vivid pieces, named as scraps of childhood, domestic scenes, remembered violence, questions, photographs, family stories, documents, and imagined reconstructions, all stitched together into something devastating and incredibly artful.

At the centre of the memoir is Castle’s father, Rudy, a man carrying the wound of being born “illegitimate,” by the absence of his own father, and by the shame that surrounded his origins. But Castle does not simplify him into villain or victim. He is frightening, volatile, sometimes cruel but he is also resourceful, hardworking, wounded, loving in broken and bewildering ways, and capable of gestures of strange tenderness. This complexity is what gives the memoir its emotional maturity. Author Castle is not writing to settle a score; she is trying to understand the system of hurt that made her father who he was, and how that hurt passed through him into her childhood.

The form of the book is one of its strongest elements. The flash structure mirrors the nature of memory itself as nonlinear, sensory, sharp-edged, and sometimes contradictory. Author Castle’s prose is beautifully controlled, often poetic without becoming ornamental. She has a remarkable ability to locate trauma in objects. The title Scrap is perfect because the memoir is not only about salvage in the literal sense, but about salvaging meaning from what was damaged, hidden, discarded, or misunderstood.

What I admired most is the book’s refusal to offer easy forgiveness. It moves toward compassion, yes, but not sentimental absolution. Scrap is a beautifully crafted and intelligent memoir about trauma, inheritance, girlhood, secrecy, and family wounds. It is painful, yes, but also tender in unexpected ways. It is a memoir that feels intimate, brave, and unforgettable.

[Diane Hutchens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Author and poet Luanne Castle’s journey back in time began decades earlier prior to the 2026 release of her memoir SCRAP Salvaging A Family A Memoir in Flash. She began jotting down scattered thoughts as they came to her not knowing how she would fashion them into a readable form.

The memoir’s cover illustration is a collage of various fragments from her life, with some that the reader may be able to decipher. Are they clues? Pieces of a long dormant puzzle? Yes. It was this hodge-podge of pieces that drew me to what would unfold during the next 165 pages.

Castle gives us “flashes” of her not always pleasant memories of growing up, in the Kalamazoo, Michigan area during the 1950s and through the ensuing decades. Her memory “flashes” are usually one-and-a-half to two pages long and written so succinctly that the reader may feel that they are a helpless voyeur who cannot intervene as the drama is played out.

The reader is introduced to her father, “The Wolf” as she imagined him as a child. He targeted her, his only child, for several years, not only with mental abuse but at times physical as well. She did not know why and wondered why her mother did not stop his actions.

Her memories are reminiscent of an old-time Brownie camera with its flash bulbs rapidly popping and propelling her memories one by one to glossy black and white films. Snapshots that showed how differently “The Wolf” treated her compared to her younger adopted brother.

Castle captures the place and time accurately, when people didn’t always know what was happening next door to a child they knew and by the standards of the day, no one intervened if they did.

Her writing skills have taken her on a journey that has been rewarding with her poetry being published in various literary journals, as well as her works being recognized with several awards.
She has found great therapeutic value in her flash memoir and brings not only her readers but herself to a much-needed conclusion with the memoirs’ principles.

Diane K. Hutchens
Retried Editor, WKAR Radio & TV
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI

[S. Hicks · Rating 5 out of 5]

In SCRAPS, Luanne Castle assembles the pieces of her life, arranging them into one of the most imaginative and moving memoirs I have read. I am in awe of the succinct and creative construction of her memories, each scrap glued in placed on a memory board of the author’s own making, where she invites the reader in, doling out each story until we begin to see a clear tapestry of her childhood, and how family secrets can tear at the fabric of our wholeness. Her prose sings in this short form, and offer the reader a perspective that feels both intimate and intense, just the way childhood is earned. We are at once with the author as she rummages the literal scrapyard she lives by as a child, then move on to the pivotal moments of being a teenager, trying to forge her own identity and sever the ties of her patriarchal, temperamental father. At one point she declares, “I don’t know how to play this game any longer. The stakes are high, the rules are hidden, and I’m not always the same person.”

As the author enters adulthood, she transforms along with her prose, adding passages where she is willing to interrogate her memory, her story, trying to understand the larger picture herself by examining how others may have viewed the scenes and relationships. She is determined to uncover the mysteries of her father, piece together his story to make sense of her own, even as she seeks to relieve herself of his hold over her. This tension builds until the very end where the reconciliation is one of forgiveness, yes, but also of a deeper understanding of how our childhood shapes each and every one of us, and the changing societal norms and shame we place upon each generation.

This is a striking memoir, beautifully told, that seeks to uncover and understand generational trauma and how to forgive each other in the end.

[Alex Craigie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This memoir is a combination of incident and reflection and the author does an excellent job presenting as honest an account as she can of her troubled childhood.
The powerful opening is a dictionary definition of the word ‘bastard’. This is the crux of the matter. Her father’s mother was unmarried when she gave birth to him and the stigma stayed with him all his life. He was a complex person, capable of great tenderness to animals, and to the Korean children he saw when he was stationed there in the army, but also prone to outbursts of violence – often for reasons that Luanne never knew. She writes that the ‘wolf teeth inside him are shifty and unpredictable’, and this was the case. She was the primary target for his rage, although her mother also suffered at his hands and was on pills for anxiety and depression. Her mother comes across as a cold parent who never intervened when her daughter was being beaten and showed little affection for her.
The second part of the book is more reflective. No longer fearing a violent outburst now that she’s married and settled, she takes a step back and tries to put herself in the shoes of her parents, her grandmother and her biological grandfather. She remembers the extravagantly good times such as his taking the family 300 miles to her favourite restaurant.
The memoir is written as scraps of memories that coalesce as she grows older and more distanced from her father. It is a riveting, often painful, read and beautifully written. When the family meet up in Chicago she writes: ‘ I can feel a membrane in the room stretch towards its breaking point’. All of us can probably identify with that.

[Eden Robins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnificently relatable and inescapably sublime.
That’s the best way I can describe Luanne Castle’s new memoir, Scrap.
When I first discovered that Scrap was written in flash, I had my reservations.
Would I be able to fully engage in the story? Would the story flow? Could I connect with the people she writes about?
Well, this is what I discovered.
This memoir, written with the kind of tactile rawness that hit me like a gut punch from the first few pages, kept me engaged until the very end. I couldn’t stop reading it. Not only is Luanne’s story a compelling one, it also is one that resonates so much with the angst and complexities of family.
Her confusion and anxiety around her relationship with her father is one that struck home. The push and pull of wanting and running from a loving but complex relationship with our parents is so poignant and expertly conveyed in this memoir that my heart ached, not only for Luanne, but for all of us trying to navigate the bonds of our heritage and what it is to be part of a family.
This wonderful testament to what it means to love the ones we’re supposed to love, combined with a mystery that I was glad to see solved, kept me turning the pages of this memoir and longing to return to it when I was busy with other parts of my life.
If you want to experience a deep remembering of the powerful love as well as the frustrating impotence one can feel about family, Scrap is the book for you.

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE REVIEW

This is such a powerful and engaging read. The author does such a stellar job of capturing an emotional and personal narrative while also discussing their relationship with their abusive father and narrowly finding the path to forgiveness through exploring his own past. The balance between memoir style, essays, and flash fiction with hints of poetry and poetic imagery in the author's writing style kept me as a reader invested in the book both emotionally and mentally.

This was also a story of identity for the author. While confronting a troubled childhood with an abusive parent is definitely center stage in this book, the author navigates the need to understand herself by looking at the past and filling in missing pieces from both of her parents and their backgrounds. The emotional impact of the author's experience and memories will resonate with readers on a personal level, keeping them invested as the book progresses.

THE VERDICT

Honest, memorable, and engaging, Author Luanne Castle’s “Scrap” is a must-read non-fiction memoir and flash narrative of essays that you really will not want to miss. The complex, emotional relationship the author explores between herself and her father is upfront and truthful, and the level of detail and immersion the reader feels as they experience the author’s life firsthand through these words will resonate with readers and keep them eager to delve deeper until the book's end.

[Cheryl Malandrinos · Rating 5 out of 5]

A powerful and poignant memoir from the talented pen of Luanne Castle awaits you in Scrap: Salvaging A Family. Raw, gut-wrenching, and provocative, this hybrid flash memoir journeys through a woman's toxic relationship with her father, finding them both in a strange place as he faces his mortality.

Wow! This memoir doesn't tug at the heartstrings. It plucks them hard and snaps a few. Scrap: Salvaging A Family is deep, it's emotional, it cracks open family secrets, and it explores family hardships that impact generations. Masterfully written, readers follow one woman's examination of her childhood trauma brought on by events that occurred well before she was born. Not understanding the hero worship her brother has for the man who shuts her out, she's not quite sure what to make of it when her relationship with her father begins to shift.

Sadly, the difficult relationship Castle had with her father feels all too real to me. I found some triggers within this memoir, and I had to put it aside at times. But it is such a beautifully told story that I had to make it to the end. The symbolism behind the scraps of fabric, the family photos on the front cover, and the inclusion of a significant family document blend so well together as the author reflects on her family relationships.

Scrap: Salvaging A Family is a brave new offering that is sure to gain attention.

[Ellen Morris Prewitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Call me a nerd—I love it when form follows function. Luanne Castle’s memoir, Scrap: Salvaging a Family does just that. Rather than traditional chapters, Luanne uses short (less than one page) vignettes. Thus, the descriptor of the book: “A Memoir in Flash.” Some of the vignetters are linked to the next entry; others stand alone. Together, they quilt together the story of Luanne’s childhood, primarily her relationship with her father and his mom, her grandmother. At a deeper level, the choice of these mini-entries echoes the title. They are scraps, used to salvage a family, in all senses of the word.

Luanne’s choice of micro form for her Scrap memoir works well. The story she shares is not easy. Male anger is a difficult topic for me, and I’m not sure I could have gotten through a traditional telling. This structure gives the reader space to rest before moving on. Time to absorb and reset. The form also focuses on the language. The first several books I read by Luanne were of her poetry. That poetic talent shines through in this telling over and over again.

It’s always hard to write a memoir. It’s doubly hard when the times you’re recalling were traumatic. The hat trick is writing a memoir that takes those times of ugliness and creates artistic beauty. Scrap accomplishes that admirably, successfully salvaging family relationships along the way.

[Wilma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Luanne Castle is a bright star in the firmament of poetry and flash prose. Her writing has appeared in innumerable literary journals, and she has published four award-winning poetry collections – Rooted and Winged, Our Wolves, Doll God, and Kin Types. Her new memoir, Scrap: Salvaging a Family [ELJ Editions, 2026], marks yet another achievement.

A memoir in flash, Scrap focuses on three discrete parts of Castle’s life in relation to her parents, especially her father. “Scrap” is a multivalent word around whose every meaning and nuance Castle fashions poignant – and sometimes horrifying – flash prose and poetry to reveal her family in all its human pain, mystery, and love.

Please buy a copy of Scrap to treasure for yourself. It’s one of the finest and most compelling memoirs you will ever read.

[Carole Duff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Those who pursue understanding of birth family members assume the emotional roller coaster of inquiry and probing. In Luanne Castle’s case, this process was also a detective story. Who was her father’s father? The answer, shrouded in hushed mystery and secrets, seemed the key to her father’s violent anger during her childhood. Years later, in her sixties—her repentant father in his eighties—Castle tenaciously gathers scraps of memory, beautifully quilts her family’s story, and masterfully guides us along the path to compassion for our flawed yet beloved fathers.

[Bookworm · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my first time reading a memoir written entirely in poetry and I was fascinated by it. Luanne Castle shares her life from childhood through present. Highlighted is her relationship with her family, her mother, her brother and in particular her father. As I read I thought how brave she is for putting these personal experiences on the page. Her poetry is beautiful and moving and I found several favorite lines.

I recommend Scrap: Salvaging a Family if you enjoy poetry about real life and the sometimes complicated dynamics of family.

[Louella Lester · Rating 5 out of 5]

I so enjoyed reading this flash memoir about, among other things, a difficult parent and coming to a greater understanding of them at the end of their life. Well done.