I Review Floyd Skloot’s “Cream of Kohlrabi”
The book includes stories about athletes and wannabe athletes, a three-story middle section peopled with a hodgepodge of characters, and a final group of stories about the elderly and the dying. Of these 16 stories, Skloot’s most successful combine pathos with humor, farce with terror. His most convincing characters suffer from some sort of physical illness: heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and other dementia that accompanies old age – Skloot himself is disabled by viral-borne brain damage.
Skloot’s best stories are about the elderly. They take place in retirement homes or under hospice care, where the characters face death sometimes with bravery and pragmatism, sometimes with delusion and optimism.
Click the image below to read my October 7, 2011, Boston Globe review.
You can buy Cream of Kohlrabi at Barnes & Noble.
