A Review was just sent from well-known Midwest Author Larry F. Sommers (Price of Passage - a Tale of Immigration and Liberation) about my story in the new Anthology Storytellers True Stories About Love (Vol. 2) Chicago Story Press 2023.
“Letting Go” will interest those who have been disappointed in love; which is to say, it’s universal.
The story begins and ends with an old blue shirt, the crunch of tires on gravel, and the flight of birds. The reverie woven between is the stuff of a thousand heartaches. It is a simple story, and nothing about its simplicity makes it easier to bear.
In other hands it might be banal, but the author, L.B. Johnson, possesses a sure lyrical style that opens the reader frankly to emotions otherwise neglected. Johnson’s poetic words do not fly off all unattached but plaster themselves to the realities of grief and hope, leaving the reader to sit back and try to account for that which is unaccountable.
“This have I known always,” wrote Edna St. Vincent Millay: “Love is no more
Than the wide blossom which the wind assails,
Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore,
Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales . . .”
Johnson’s story, in just over two thousand words, compasses the love and the wreckage, and sums up the hope that endures.
Readers with hearts of stone need not apply. For the rest of us, “Letting Go” is a small revelation."
