The Tiki Room - book

There is a new book out titled 'The Tiki Room' written by a woman named Cathy Nolan Vincevic.

I haven't read the book, only sampled pages on-line, so it is difficult to tell what the book is like, although I'm fairly positive it is less cheerful than Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room attraction. The book is a memoir of childhood memories, that includes a difficult and possibly abusive mother. One of the rooms in the author's childhood home was identified as the 'tiki room' and that appears to be the inspiration for the title of the book.

Here is the description from amazon.com.
*“The Tiki Room,” plunges the reader into a vision both elegiac, and horrifying, chronicling the struggles of my family. The landscapes are stoic, small town New Hampshire, during the 1950’s, where I lived with my beloved grandparents, contrasted against the cruelty of life with my mother in Phoenix, Arizona, during the 1960’s and my husband’s story in Bosnia and in the diaspora. The coalescence of these environments, and some of the tragic consequences, have been passages filled with destruction, loss, and renewal. *

A recent news article talked about a reading that Vincevic took part in. Here is the description from that account.

*One of the most startling readings of the night came from former Boston-area performance artist Cathy Vincevic who read a portion of her book "The Tiki Room," a novel that she described as a look into the circumstances under which dictators perpetrate genocide. Like many other readers that night, Vincevic's story started out with an autobiographical tone, and she described a scene apparently set in her childhood some three decades earlier as she lost a coin on her way to a country store in Candia.

But this bucolic vignette vanishes like smoke as Vincevic segues the story sharply into her first trip to Bosnia where she is confronted by "bullet, bullet, bullet everywhere" and witnesses scenes of Holocaust-type intensity. Vincevic read the chapter as an example of her novel, in which she said similar pastoral vignettes are intertwined among heavier observations of inhumanity.*

The book sounds way more intense than the Enchanted Tiki Room.

http://www.amazon.com/Tiki-Room-Cathy-Nolan-Vincevic/dp/1438917503

[ Edited by: ikitnrev 2008-11-24 08:52 ]

Brilliant. The Tiki Room is the metaphor for that childhood innocence that was shattered by the world's insanity! The dropped doll that gets stomped into a mud puddle by a soldiers marching boot! There is no Tiki Room in Bosnia...
Is there a punk version of the Tiki Tiki Room song, sung with spit flyin' atcha?

PS.: That book's title will create some serious search result confusion.

[ Edited by: bigbrotiki 2008-11-24 14:27 ]

This one's on my Christmas list! It'll make great reading with an arsenic Mai Tai.
Aloha,
:tiki: