Here Is Ware: Stories

by Michael Cocchiarale

Set in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York—and in places between and beyond—these stories feature characters baffled by where they are in their lives. Several focus on returns—the emotions that roil, the dark secrets that press against the heart. A son attempts to endure a short visit to his parents, anxious about the effect such a tension-filled trip might have on his usually sunny wife. Home for the holidays, a thirty-something father tries to understand his life through the lens of sports. An abuse-haunted man, back in town for the funeral of a brother, encounters a former high school classmate who gives him a tour of her shrine to a fam ous rock-n-roller. A divorced mother, responding to a shocking family tragedy, sets out with her young daughter for the home she wishes she could forget. In the title piece, a novella-in-flash, a young woman escapes serious family dysfunction by moving away to college; however, she learns her hometown is a place she cannot so easily leave behind. In these and other stories, characters are coming and going, forever shaped by where they are.

230 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 18, 2018

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here is Ware presents a wonderful collection of stories by Michael Cocchiarale. Cocchiarale deftly presents the vagaries and tragedies of the human condition overlaid on the working class suburbs of Cleveland and the grey weather towns of Ohio and Pennsylvania. His characters live ordinary lives described with extraordinary poetic metaphor and blunt sadness. Every story is seasoned with the themes of memory and turmoil, family and returns.

From the tension of going back to childhood homes and unpleasant memories to the choices that open and close opportunities, these are the stories of ordinary lives that get lost in the cracks of middle America even as the characters try to rise up from their pasts. Cocchiarale shows us that although you can elevate from beginnings, you cannot escape the gravitational pull of family roots.

This collection of short stories and one novella will entertain, elucidate and pull you in. Don't pass up these opportunities.

[Tara · Rating 4 out of 5]

LOVED the novella that ends this collection. Beautifully written and unique.