Little Avalanches: A Memoir

Ellis debuts with a bracing exploration of intergenerational trauma and the power of honest dialogue to defang it. After 170 days of hellish combat as an Allied soldier in 1944 Germany, Ellis’s father returned home to the United States with hero’s honors and debilitating PTSD. She sandwiches a visceral account of his military experience between chapters about its destructive effects on her childhood and other sections that illuminate how, decades later, she and her father repaired their relationship as “one story at a time, he revealed himself to me.” Ellis’s childhood was marked by her father’s unpredictable moods and rages. He was determined to make Ellis and her brother “tough, driven, and compliant” by exposing them to danger; in one particularly harrowing episode, he forces Ellis to have six cavities filled without anesthesia. When he reached old age and his health declined, she inquired, for the first time, about his war service, prompting him to open up and allowing them to connect at last. Ellis expertly balances pain with compassion as she plunges into the depths of her father’s PTSD armed with frank and flinty prose. It’s a radiant and healing account. Agent: Heather Jackson, Heather Jackson Literary. (Mar.)