A review of Scrap, Salvaging a Family, by Luanne Castle

/ Garrulous Gwendoline

In my younger days, when the postman called twice a day, I had pen-pals. Over time, through those eagerly awaited letters, we correspondents would get to know each other, and every once in a while, discover we had much in common.

It’s been a bit like that with fellow blogger and author Luanne Castle, long time admirers of each other’s writing even though our genre and style differed.

It is only recently, with each of us releasing a new book, we have discovered our common ground runs deep. Deep between us, and deep in our ancestors’ stories. Something of a revelation to us both, I suspect!

I’m delighted to recommend Luanne’s work to you and hope you find my review a helpful guide. My Australian followers can purchase Scrap, Salvaging a Family – a memoir in Flash in digital or paperback format through Amazon.

I’ve read many memoirs over the years, but I’d never encountered one written entirely in “flash” until now. Luanne Castle guides us through her early childhood, young womanhood, marriage, and later life in a series of brief, finely crafted vignettes as she tries to understand her relationship with her father. In my own memoir, I touch on my ambivalence about not having a father by writing, “he may have been both protector and tyrant in one, which would have been more frightening than having no father at all.” Castle’s book shows us, with startling clarity, what it is to be the daughter of exactly such a man.

There are moments of kindness. A cartoon of him changing her diaper hangs in his carpentry room, where he sets up a small workbench just for her. But his moods shift quickly, and when they do, the “wolf face” appears. His spankings are not just harsh—they exceed what was considered acceptable even in an era when corporal punishment was commonplace.

Worse still is the psychological fear he instills, which intensifies as Castle grows older and begins to date. Eventually she leaves home in haste. When she returns the next day, she opens the door to find a gun balanced on the kitchen table, its barrel pointed at her chest. It turns out to be a toy, but that hardly softens the moment.

At a recent gathering of women writers, we talked about the trauma we inherit from our parents. Do they keep their secrets believing they’re protecting us? And what happens when silence itself becomes the thing passed down—shame, insecurity, and confusion that were never ours to carry? Castle could easily have sat at that table with us. In her father’s final days, she learns the secret that shaped him: the shame of illegitimacy, and his fear that she might somehow repeat his mother’s “mistakes.”

Castle is a poet, and it shows. Her economy of language gives each memory fragment a sharp, bright edge. The brevity is almost a kindness—it lets the reader pause, breathe, and absorb what life must have felt like for the young girl who walked on eggshells.

Her father, never fathered himself and burdened by secrecy and shame, struggled to parent her and passed his pain along. That Castle ultimately reaches a kind of forgiveness speaks to her ability to hold complexity—to see the humanity he could show others, even while recognising how deeply flawed he was with her.

The title Scrap is beautifully chosen. Scraps run through the memoir: her grandmother’s quilts, her father’s sculptures made from discarded metal, and the fragments of memory, stories, photographs, and documents Castle gathers to piece together the truth of her family life.

20 thoughts on “A review of Scrap, Salvaging a Family, by Luanne Castle”

  5. Pingback: Fabulous Review | Luanne Castle: Poetry and Other Words (and cats!)

  6. LIke you, I had penfriends from overseas and am still in touch with most of them. A special kind of relationship developed to become familiar with someone through words on a page that had travelled from the other side of the world. The experience of meeting in person was always positive! Blogging seemed like an extension of penfriendships, when the internet arrived. Regarding having parents that carried trauma, (except it was not called that, in their era)., for me forgiveness has been essential to escape the merry-go-round of inter-generational blame and ongoing trauma – recognizing those parents often did the best they could manage given their circumstances. No parent tries to do a bad job deliberately, do they? Unless they have psychopathy?
    I will take a look at Luanne’s blog and book.

    Reply

    • Luanne would be delighted if you read her book, and a review would be fabulous. You know how important that it to us writers.
      I think “doing our best” is as much as any of us can strive for. Forgiveness is essential for our own well-being. xxg

      Reply

      • Unfortunately, Luanne’s book is a bit expensive atm from Amazon US for me ( $52 plus dhipping). I would like to read it and I thought the format of micro or flash fiction stories was a fantastic concept for memoir.

        Reply

          • Hi Amanda, I am so pleased you persisted as I think you will find this an intriguing approach and may also derive inspiration.

            I haven’t started it yet, but I believe Australian author Sue Woolfe has also gone down this road with her recently released “The Girl Who Climbed on Rooves”. She has chosen to approach the material as a novel.

            I want to come back to your Amazon experience which I found very, very interesting.
            When I first searched, I also was faced with that $50+ price. At the time, I put it down to it being a new release that Amazon was testing how much the market would bear. After several more times searching, it dropped to A$37.08 and I got my copy freight-free as my neighbour is a regular customer.

            In light of your experience, I suspect the Amazon algorithm is refined enough to not only treat the market as a whole, but at the individual level. You might test my theory by returning to the search over a number of occasions from the same device and seeing if the price drops to what I paid (which is a fair market price).

            US sellers often employ dynamic pricing aka real time pricing, surge pricing, variable pricing, to respond on a daily basis to changing market conditions. But that they could pinpoint one specific individual is new to me. (That is, if my theory holds up).

            The only other time I’ve seen it is with hotel booking third parties, and usually what happens is that the more times you search the same property, the price goes up. i.e. Rather than, “Oh? You won’t buy at this price – what about this lower one?” it goes, “Oh? Your holiday is getting closer and you still haven’t made up your mind? Well, availability is getting scarce, so now if you want this place, you’ll have to pay more.”

            Sorry about the essay. I think my “not terribly useful” Masters in Electronic Commerce just found its purpose in life. xxx Gwen

          • I think you may have hit upon something here, Gwen. I did have a similar experience with Amazon, in purchasing an anthology I contributed to, and, after subsequent visits to the same Amazon site, I noticed the price had dropped to a more moderate and acceptable level. At the time, I suspected it was higher initially, because it was a new release. Once the initial flurry of sales diminished, the algorithm then dropped the price?
            Thanks for the heads up in this regard. I far prefer hard copies of books, but took Luanne’s ebook as a viable alternative to paying $85 AUD to ship to Australia.

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