Praise and Reviews
Read what others are saying about Name the Boy:
Shawn Kerivan’s Name the Boy is an emotionally raw, often cathartic collection of short stories about brotherly love, brotherly rage, and the sins of the fathers. The combination of a delightfully droll voice and a hairpin storytelling style can give you the shivers. This is a highly accomplished literary debut.
~Richard Panek, author, Waterloo Diamonds, The Invisible Century and Seeing and Believing,
Name the Boy is peopled with boys trying to find their way in uncertain, unpredictable and sometimes-malevolent family and socio/economic settings. These stories, primarily of working people, of poverty, of alcohol, of violence, circle around and around the complex matrix of father/son relationships. Shawn knows that we are not disembodied people, that we are created by our work, our worlds, our social status, and by the natural world around us, and all of that is right here in the stories, more or less causative yet always important, always central, always the context within which the often awful human drama plays itself out.
~Nicola Morris, Ph.D.
Name the Boy will shake you. These eleven short stories bear witness to fathers and sons. There are horrors in this book and love that lives in a wide-open hand. These stories have changed the way I see things. Kerivan’s people move into your head and stay. Their dialogue is relevant and their situations are both singular and familiar. Shawn Kerivan is the man to watch.
~Nancy McCurry, MFAW, Freelance Editor
