Story Merchant Books: Publisher's Weekly Booklife Review of Kenneth Atchity's My Obit: Daddy Holding Me

AVAILABLE ON AMAZON

Filled with humorous anecdotes, pictures, and a unique perspective from an immigrant's child growing up in the south, this memoir offers the reader a dive into childhood trauma, and learning to rethink those experiences. Atchity is a seasoned writer and storyteller, peppering his work with homages to the literary greats, such as Homer. The reader will enjoy this novel, and likely come away from it with helpful knowledge to help them traverse through their own life journey.

Atchity's prose reads like an erudite grandpa telling a story to some curious grandkids. His flowing, informal language mixed with elegant phrasing entices the reader to continue along on his life journey; he spices up the writing with a perfect amount of pictures, poetry, and quotes to keep the reader interested.

Although memoirs are not uncommon, Atchity has lived an uncommon enough life to make this memoir interesting for the reader. With his unique heritage and complicated parental relationships, his work will speak to a wide range of readers, and offer curious insights.

Being a memoir, this work is mostly focused on Atchity and his experiences. The rest of the characters present more as players in a game that are there to support the story that is the author's life, rather than living their own lives separate from him. However, he presents these characters honestly according to his own perspectives, which provide insight into his development at the various stages of his life.

My Obit: Daddy Holding Me by Kenneth Atchity

 

 On Amazon 

My Obit: Daddy Holding Me a page-turner filled with poignant family experiences, explosive sibling rivalry, literary adventures, ethnic cooking, wide-ranging storytelling, the workings of the brain itself--and what can be learned about life from playing tennis for decades. 

"I’ve lived a lifetime of literary adventures by refusing to be relegated to a niche. In My Obit: Daddy Holding Me, my storytelling passion and family and professional anecdotes provide humor and insight into my hugely self-determined life."

~ Ken Atchity

Advanced Praise for My Obit: Daddy Holding Me:

“Powerful. Honest. Heartwarming. A courageous examination of the secret nooks in the soul that expose to the self who we truly are… and why. Atchity’s memoir is riveting, reflective, and revealing. A MUST read!” – Tracy Price-Thompson, bestselling novelist

 “My Obit: Daddy Holding Me by Kenneth Atchity is a compelling autobiography worthy of the analogy of Sisyphus discovering the burdens and pleasures of each push of the rock up the hill of his extraordinary life.” – Norman Stephens, producer, former head of Warner Brothers television.

Story Merchant Books is pleased to announce our next Zoom Book Launch Party!

This time with Ken Atchity's latest title, My Obit: Daddy Holding Me by Kenneth Atchity, on Monday, March 28th 2022 at 4pm PST / 7pm EST!

On the day of the event, you will be emailed with the Zoom link and Password. Register here!

 

 On Amazon 

Robert L. Rivenbark, Jr. Reviews Vincent Atchity's Story Merchant Book Romeo's Beat

Available on Amazon

How delightful to discover in the #MeToo age, when trust between men and women—and romantic love itself—has reached its nadir in our dysfunctional culture, that it’s still possible for an American novelist to write a literary love story that celebrates the eternal bond between man and woman. That’s precisely what Vincent Atchity has achieved with Romeo’s Beat. His novel has a deceptively simple premise—until you let it enfold and lift you into regions rarely explored in contemporary fiction. The points of comparison I can think of in terms of Atchity’s style are Ernest Hemingway (particularly in A Farewell to Arms) and Anaïs Nin (particularly in her Ladders to Fire). But Atchity has his own distinct voice, well-suited to his subject matter, giving his book a rhythm and cadence that make it a prose poem of unsurpassed beauty.

I had the honor of hearing Atchity do a live reading from his novel. During the Q&A afterward, he mentioned that given his responsibilities running a psychological clinic and raising three children with his wife, he had only been able to devote sixteen minutes day to his novel, beginning in 2007. Thankfully, he persisted, and the result is exquisite.

Set in the early 1980s, an era when great rock anthems resounded from FM stations, Romeo’s Beat follows the journeys of Juliet, a beautiful young Kansas botanist possessed of a mystical bond with nature; and Colin, a young singer/lyricist/guitarist who’s postponed recording his first record album in L.A., despite a lucrative recording contract, in a quest to find something enduring in his own music.

Juliet meets Colin while she’s on a solo pilgrimage to Salamanca, Spain, the city of her philosophical hero, Miguel de Unamuno. In her strolls through Salamanca’s cobblestone streets, she returns often to the Calle de Bordodores to see Pablo Serrano’s monumental statue of Unamuno. Yards away is one of her favorite shrines to Mary. Juliet considers her own personal religions to lie “suspended in a continuum between Unamuno and the Virgin Mary.” Unamuno scribed these words: “My religion is to seek for truth in life and life in truth.” Juliet believes this, too. “Even knowing that I shall not find them while I live,” she sadly concludes.

She’s at a crossroads. Having won a scholarship to begin her doctoral studies in botany in a month, she’s also engaged to Brad, a pleasant enough young man who brings solid financial prospects, given his upscale family roots. But Brad operates on a plain of consciousness that can’t begin to approach Juliet’s capacity to blend romantic and sexual passion with mystical intimations that take her into realms of awareness lightyears beyond Brad’s conventionality. She tells herself that she loves Brad, but that affirmation has started to ring hollow. Then she meets Colin in Salamanca, during his stopover on a peripatetic journey through Europe in search of his musical voice. The thunderbolt strikes them both. Juliet is powerfully drawn to this stranger in a way wholly unacceptable to her trajectory in life, so soon to be devoted to study, teaching, and a conventional marriage.

Colin, for his part, is strongly attracted to Juliet as well, but he’s obsessed with his own search, expressed in this reflection while he samples garlic-fried Champiñones mushrooms in a Salamanca tavern: “Colin had learned to cook from his father, and had a deep appreciation for dishes that brought together fundamental elements. The smell of olive oil and garlic had won him over before he’d even realized its source. It had grabbed something inside him that was older than he was, something that was inside everyone, and that would outlast any individual. For lyrics to last, Colin thought, they had to incorporate something as fundamental as olive oil and garlic.”

What follows is an elegantly articulated dance of love that focuses on the internal journeys of the two lovers, as they gradually come to accept that their meeting is going to disrupt their lives and change them both profoundly. The pace of this change unfolds slowly—perhaps too slowly for modern readers (though the novel is a quick read at 144 pages). But despite this minor pacing issue, Atchity does a magnificent job of dramatizing how, as their relationship becomes more intimate, Juliet’s and Colin’s hearts and souls are embroidered together, giving special significance to the Calle de Bordodores (which means “embroiderers”) that Juliet visits so often. From their love grows intimacy, the birth of a daughter, and a tragedy that raises the tale to classical stature.

It’s remarkable how Atchity occupies the minds, hearts, and souls of Juliet and Colin, particularly since we live in an age where writing from the point of view of the “other”—men writing from a feminine point of view, or women writing from a male point of view—is a taboo that often reduces our literature in a way that great writers of previous ages didn’t have to contend with (imagine Shakespeare hesitating to write Romeo and Juliet because he wasn’t a woman). Atchity’s insights are those of a mature artist who’s achieved a measure of wisdom about the eternal truths of life and love. At the end of the novel, I found myself hungering for more of this gifted writer’s work. Highly recommended reading.

My Obit: Daddy Holding Me by Kenneth Atchity

 On Amazon 

My Obit: Daddy Holding Me a page-turner filled with poignant family experiences, explosive sibling rivalry, literary adventures, ethnic cooking, wide-ranging storytelling, the workings of the brain itself--and what can be learned about life from playing tennis for decades. 

"I’ve lived a lifetime of literary adventures by refusing to be relegated to a niche. In My Obit: Daddy Holding Me, my storytelling passion and family and professional anecdotes provide humor and insight into my hugely self-determined life."

~ Ken Atchity

Advanced Praise for My Obit: Daddy Holding Me:

“Powerful. Honest. Heartwarming. A courageous examination of the secret nooks in the soul that expose to the self who we truly are… and why. Atchity’s memoir is riveting, reflective, and revealing. A MUST read!” – Tracy Price-Thompson, bestselling novelist

 “My Obit: Daddy Holding Me by Kenneth Atchity is a compelling autobiography worthy of the analogy of Sisyphus discovering the burdens and pleasures of each push of the rock up the hill of his extraordinary life.” – Norman Stephens, producer, former head of Warner Brothers television.

‘Meg 2: The Trench’ Adds Sienna Guillory, Skyler Samuels and Sergio Peris-Mencheta

 Sienna Guillory, the Resident Evil actress last seen in Clifford the Big Red Dog; Skyler Samuels, who starred in Fox’s superhero show The Gifted; and Snowfall actor Sergio Peris-Mencheta have signed on to Warner Bros.’ sequel to its 2018 surprise hit featuring a very hungry prehistoric shark, known as a megalodon, which fights a very svelte Jason Statham.

Additionally, Cliff Curtis, Shuya Sophia Cai and Page Kennedy are reprising their roles, joining Statham in more shark-hunting shenanigans.

Peris-Mencheta is playing one of the film’s antagonists, a hard-edged mercenary. Guillory is the head of an applied sciences division, while Samuels is an adventure-loving member of Statham’s submarine crew.

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Chinese Superstar Wu Jing Joins Jason Statham in Warner’s ‘Meg 2,’ Li Bingbing Exits the Mega-Shark Franchise

 

Wu Jing, the highest-grossing male actor of all time in China, will join British action star Jason Statham in Warner Bros.’s “Meg 2: The Trench,” sources close to the production have confirmed to Variety.

The giant shark actioner, however, will be without Li Bingbing (“Transformers: Age of Extinction”). The Chinese actor, who played a female oceanographer, embodying both brains and beauty in Jon Turteltaub’s testosterone-fueled 2018 “The Meg,” is not returning to the franchise at this point.

With Ben Wheatley in the directing chair, production on “Meg 2: The Trench” began at the end of January at the Warner-owned Leavesden Studios outside London. It will continue there until May before switching to outdoor locations, likely to be in Asia.

The 47-year-old Wu is a former martial artist who has successfully parlayed a career as both actor and director in film and in TV. A protégé of the iconic action choreographer Yuen Woo-ping

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