Scrap–Salvaging A Family by Luanne Castle: A Must Read

Posted on by

Have you ever picked up a book, not knowing what to expect, and become so wrapped up in the story and the writing that you just don’t want to put it down? That was my experience  reading Luanne Castle’s newest book Scrap: Salvaging a Family. From the first page until I finished it, I was spellbound.

Luanne has published four volumes of poetry and many poems and flash prose pieces1 in numerous publications, but I first encountered her writing through her genealogy blog, The Family Kalamazoo, and although Scrap is not about genealogy per se, it is about family history: how our parents and our grandparents and those before them all shape the people we become. In this memoir, we see how Luanne’s father was affected by his family history and how that in turn affected the author, his daughter.

The book is written in a series of short “flashes” of specific memories tied together into a revealing and heart-wrenching story of her relationship with her father, a man she both loved and feared. Her writing is clear and beautiful and although written in prose, the language is poetic. The images she creates are powerful and resonant.

Here are two examples, one showing how much she loved her father when she was a little girl, the second showing how much she feared him. Notice how she uses images of his arms in both, each image serving to evoke a specific emotion.

“A man throws his efforts into the project. A little girl, face like a cup, watched his Superman arms crank on the vise handle and tighten the grip. The girl is me, and the workbench, its surface scarred by hammer blows, belongs to the shoemaker’s elves that visit the man when I am asleep. He presides over the saw, aiming for the pencil line, sawdust falling away on each side as snow does from a plow. On the pegboard, pliers and screws line up by size like Goldilocks’ bears. I sit behind the man who is my father, the chilled concrete floor twanging my backside.”

In this second memory those arms she admired for their strength as she watched him work turn into something much more threatening.

“Daddy tickles me, and when I squirm away, giggling, he rolls me on the planked floor where we play wrestle. When I tickle him, he belly-shake laughs. When I don’t want to go to bed until it’s black outside, his joy dissolves fast and leaves an unpleasantness that charges to anger. I watch for the inside of his tanned arms. When I see the flash of their snake-white underbellies, I try to run. One of them catches me by the back of my shirt. The other pulls up my skirt and down my panties. Daddy raises that arm up above us before he smacks it down on my bottom.”

Those arms reappear many other times in Luanne’s memories, most often in ways that are threatening and angry. But I will leave it to you to read the book to see how the author’s story develops and how she learns to understand her father’s anger and where it comes from. I promise you that you will be moved to tears, some of grief, some of anger, and some of joy. There were even times I laughed. And there were many times that I sat back and re-read a page a few times over, marveling in the language, the depth of feeling, and the universality of some aspects of her story. Aren’t we all somewhat mystified by who our parents are and why they are the way they are? Luanne Castle had the courage to dig deeply enough to learn who her father was and why he was the way he was.

You can purchase the book here or here, and you can learn more about the author and her other works at her website here.

Luanne Castle’s story, “Garden Seasons,” was selected for Best Microfiction 2026. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Copper Nickel, River Teeth, Your Impossible Voice, JMWW, Grist, Fourteen Hills, Verse Daily, Disappointed Housewife, Lunch Ticket, Saranac Review, Pleiades, Cleaver, Moon City, Moon Park, Anti-Heroin Chic, Bending Genres, BULL, The Mackinaw, The Ekphrastic Review, Phoebe, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Gone Lawn, and many other journals. She has published four award-winning poetry collections.  Her ekphrastic flash and poetry collection Hunting the Cosmos is forthcoming from Shanti Arts in fall 2026.

 

 

 

 

 

  1. I was unfamiliar with the literary term “flash” until I started reading Luanne’s works. I asked her for a definition, and she sent me this explanation: “Flash–both fiction and nonfiction–is a prose story told in fewer than 1,000 words–and frequently less than 300 when it can sometimes be referred to as microfiction. Unlike short stories which can be up to 7,500 words, flash cannot contain unnecessary words and images. This does not mean that flash should not contain specific and important details. Finally, much is told by innuendo, by suggestion, and by placement of one image or phrase next to another.” ↩

21 thoughts on “Scrap–Salvaging A Family by Luanne Castle: A Must Read”

  1. Pingback: Genealogy Sort Of in Scrap | Luanne Castle: Poetry and Other Words (and cats!)

  2. Amy, thank you so very much for this intelligent and heartfelt review of Scrap! You noticing my dad’s arms just made my week! Without genealogical research and DNA testing I might still be in the dark.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

  3. I’ll be honest and say it all sounds a bit too traumatic for me to read right now…I found a review on Kirkus as well, so might see if our library can buy it. I know a lot of patrons would like to read something like this.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply ↓

  5. You asked, “Aren’t we all somewhat mystified by who our parents are and why they are the way they are?” The answer is sort of yes. But I also would like to ask “Aren’t we all somewhat mystified by who our children think we are and why we are the way we are?”

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply ↓

    • Bob, hah, true, too. My husband wants to make a list of all the accomplishments he’s had in his life (there are many–it will be a long list) for the kids because he’s pretty sure they have no idea about 99.9999%.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply ↓

      • If experience tells me anything, it’s that most people don’t much care about the lives of their parents, grandparents, etc., until they get to around 60. (That’s when I got interested.) And by then it’s too late to ask many of their relatives. If I could just spent a few hours with my four grandparents, I would have so many questions…

        Liked by 1 person

      • You are so right about that. I have an entire file cabinet of family history, mainly photographs dating back to mid-18th century, and who is going to want them?

        Liked by 1 person

      • If your kids don’t want them, I am sure there is a museum or archive that will. I have so little in terms of original documents since my parents saved nothing (except for some more “recent” family photographs, i.e., since the 1950s). Most of what I’ve found through my research is from cousins who shared digital images with me, and those are all on my computer, in the cloud, and on my blog.

        Liked by 1 person

      • I don’t know why I thought that they won’t take them. I just looked it up and it appears there are ones that will, so thank you. My grandfather actually gave a bazillion glass negatives and photos to the archives at Western Michigan University before he gave me the rest. This is because his uncle was a photographer so there was so much. I wish they were online.

        Liked by 1 person

      • I am so glad you found a future home for your photos and documents. It is so sad to think how many historically important items are just thrown away. How I wish I had some photos of my grandparents as children.

        Liked by 1 person

      • Oh, I can well imagine you feel that way!!! I have photos of my maternal grandparents as kids, but not the other side. But I do have my paternal grandmother as a young woman just before hair bobbing.

        Liked by 1 person

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.