Karen Charbonneau

A Devil Singing Small Karen Charbonneau

(See book trailer on Author's Page) What would you do if, after a dozen years of trying to be the perfect wife to an unpredictable combat veteran with a hair-trigger temper, your husband is diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic? 

This family saga, spanning the years from World War II through the Vietnam War and after, recounts the unseen wounds war inflicts on two generations of an American family. With a raw authenticity stripped of self-pity and with a poet's eye for lyrical detail, Betty recounts her wartime romance with Army Air Corps Sergeant Mitch Lanier, raised in a Catholic orphanage; their rocky marriage; the births of a son and daughter; and Mitch's gradual downward spiral from a man who built his own home and could fix anything into a schizophrenic, obsessed with the Virgin Mary and extra-terrestrial flight. 

They raise their family in rural Idaho, where Betty relies on her inner life - her love of the land - to give her the fortitude to fulfill her marriage vows and the courage to protect her family and seek whatever help is available for Mitch. Betty grows from a subservient homemaker of the 1940s and '50s to a breadwinner in the 1960s. Love and temptation, fear and loss give a razor's edge to a sometime funny, often difficult, life. 

It is also the story of the conflicting relationship between Betty and daughter Torie, who seeks her future in Washington, D. C., during the anti-war movement; and Betty's pride and apprehensions for son Michael, a combat infantry lieutenant in Vietnam. 

The lives of this post-war American family are etched with vivid detail. The author drew on her observations of her father's schizophrenia to give this novel a sometimes tender, sometimes brutal, realism.