Brinkman, Kiara 1979-

views updated

Brinkman, Kiara 1979-

PERSONAL:

Born 1979. Education: Brown University, B.A., 2001; Goddard College, M.F.A., 2006.

ADDRESSES:

Home—San Francisco, CA. E-mail—kb.inthetrees@gmail.com.

CAREER:

Writer and educator. Works as a teacher and tutor for special-needs students.

WRITINGS:

Up High in the Trees (novel), Grove Press (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to periodicals, including McSweeney's, One Story, and Pindeldyboz.

SIDELIGHTS:

Kiara Brinkman is a novelist and short-story writer from San Francisco, California. A teacher and tutor, Brinkman often works with special-needs students with autism. In an interview with Elizabeth Schmitz posted on her home page, Brinkman notes that she has worked with children in San Francisco's rugged Tenderloin district and has tutored children with conditions that fall along the entire spectrum of autism, from Asperger's syndrome to more serious manifestations of autism and related disorders. Brinkman told Schmitz that her experiences as a tutor and teacher influenced her writing.

Brinkman's experiences working with children with autism provide a real-world background for her debut novel, Up High in the Trees. The protagonist of the novel is nine-year-old Sebastian "Sebby" Lane, an autistic child who is gripped by grief and confusion at the recent death of his mother, Louise, who was killed when she was hit by a car while out jogging. Worse, his mother was pregnant with a baby girl at the time, already named Sara Rose. His mother's favored child, Sebby and she shared a deep and special bond, and in his grief he tries desperately to hold on to every memory he has of his mother, from the days when she would strap him to herself as a baby and go for a jog, to the little notes and responses that the two would hide for each other around the house, to the word games they would play. Sebby shares his acute emotional pain with his father, a music professor at Wellesley College, and his older brother and sister. As his father slides ever deeper into a debilitating depression, Sebby's older siblings take on more and more of the practical matters of running the household. When the confused and emotionally volatile Sebby bites a classmate who upset him, his father takes him out of school and travels with him to a remote family cabin, hoping for a chance to recover and reconcile. Once there, however, his father's depression worsens. Sebby tries to make friends in the waterfront neighborhood and longs for his mother and unborn sister. Soon, his father is hospitalized for a self-inflicted injury, and Sebby is back in the care of his beleaguered older siblings, who do their best to care for him but are themselves approaching overload. As the story unfolds, evidence mounts that Sebby's mother may herself have been suffering from mental illness, and that her death might not have been an accident. As Sebby reaches out for help wherever he can find it, his resolve and will to live is tested to the limit.

In assessing the book, Washington Post reviewer Ron Charles stated: "No one could blame you for turning away from Kiara Brinkman's haunting first novel. The muffled pain of Up High in the Trees will trigger your reflex for emotional protection but, if you can bear it, the treasures here are exquisite. I can't remember when I ever felt so torn between recoiling from a story and wishing I could somehow cross into its pages and comfort a character." Brinkman "clearly understands emotional pain and in Sebby has created a heroic child protagonist," commented Eleanor J. Bader in a Library Journal review. Sebastian "is most unusual for the lyrical intensity of his inner life, and the strongest impression this fine debut leaves is his nicely achieved voice, which is moving without being precious," observed reviewer Madison Smartt Bell in the New York Times Book Review. The novel's case is "portrayed with keen sympathy and sensitivity—no easy task with a young, on-the-spectrum narrator," remarked a Publishers Weekly critic. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the novel a "promising debut" that showcases Brinkman's "impressive ability to connect with and portray the myopic grief of a bereft child."