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2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
THE BATTLE INSIDE a review by Meagan Lucas Katey Schultz. Still Come Home: A Novel. Apprentice House Press, 2019.
MEAGAN LUCAS is the author of the award-winning novel Songbirds and Stray Dogs (Main Street Rag, 2019; reviewed in this issue). She has a BA in History from Wilfrid Laurier University, an MEd in Curriculum and Instruction from Ferris State University, and an MA in English and Creative Writing from Southern New Hampshire University. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College and lives in Hendersonville with her family. Still Come Home, KATEY SCHULTZ’s first novel, received the 2020 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. Hear her award acceptance remarks here. Schultz’s story “Something Coming” was selected by Ben Founain for the 2019 Doris Betts Fiction Prize, sponsored by the North Carolina Writers’ Network. It was published in NCLR 2020. The author earned her MFA in Writing from Pacific University and founded Maximum Impact, a mentorship service that provides transformative online curricula for serious writers. She has been awarded writing fellowships in eight different states. She lives in Celo, NC.
Katey Schultz’s novel Still Come Home takes place in war-torn Afghanistan. If you’ve read Schultz’s first book, Flashes of War (2013; reviewed in NCLR Online 2014), you might expect that Still Come Home, with its Middle East location and soldier characters, would be focused on the war, and it is, in the way that the setting of this story is integral to the plot and character motivation. But if you’re expecting details of maneuvers, or minutiae about battles or weapons, you’d be wrong. To label this book as a “war novel” ignores its depth and resonance. It is about battles, but not those won or lost on the ground, rather those waged inside our hearts and minds. Still Come Home is a story of desire and shame, loneliness, redemption, and atonement, and it will leave you thinking about it for weeks after. In Still Come Home, three people navigate three lifechanging days. The story is told in chapters of alternating perspectives, and the three-day countdown structure creates effective tension. The first character we meet is seventeenyear-old Afghani, Aaseya, who “wants her freedom . . . to do everything she shouldn’t” (3). She is educated and ambitious, but naïve. Aaseya’s family, accused of being American sympathizers, were murdered by the Taliban three years before. Aaseya, the sole survivor, was forced at fourteen to marry a friend of the family, Rahim, in order to survive, but effectively she’s been left with nothing: “the Taliban reduced her fate to one moment of dust and vibration that stole everything from her but her own heartbeat” (18). Aaseya rebels against the
restrictions and misogyny of her small town and her culture, but what is most compelling is her upbeat attitude in the face of devastating loneliness. The loss of her family and her marriage to a man who is a partner in name only has left her isolated and searching. She befriends a mute orphan who provides her with not only companionship, but a buffer from her shame of being childless. The theme of shame, introduced early when Aaseya’s sister-in-law tells her, “The only thing worse than death is shame” (10), is a current that runs deep, through all of the characters’ motivations. National Guard Second Lieutenant Nathan Miller is on his fourth tour. His wife and daughter are back home in North Carolina, and Miller considers this tour as his “final chance to find his cool again, forget that he ever drafted a suicide note, and land softly back home, back into marriage, composed and capable as ever” (25). Miller, a natural and empathetic leader, is struggling with guilt over the death of one of his soldiers and the miscarriage of a child as he leads his platoon into a dangerous final mission. Miller is a well-developed, nuanced character. Schultz shows him at home in North Carolina, uncomfortable in civilian life, in contrast with his prowess on base and during dangerous military missions. Where Aaseya is naïve, Nathan is worldly. He has seen too much to be innocent and verges on being jaded. While Aaseya searches for independence, for freedom, Nathan is looking for forgiveness and something to cling to. Forty-year-old Rahim, Aaseya’s husband and the third