"The prose is exquisite, the mood heartbreaking." - N. Frank Daniels, author of Futureproof
AMAZON.COM - 18/18 reviews give 5 stars to "Homefront"
Author bio:
Kristen J. Tsetsi is a staff writer for a CT newspaper, a Women's eNews correspondent, and an award-winning fiction writer whose work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared on the MWA's list of notable stories of 2006.
Her husband deployed to Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division just before the war in Iraq started and returned a year later. Homefront, semi-autobiographical, explores the intimate emotional and psychological experience of having a lover at war.
CRITICAL REVIEWS
"By alternating plot with a slices-of-life format, Tsetsi gives dimension to her book in a subtle and masterful way, contrasting her clear, precise, concrete prose—which makes up the majority of the book—with a quasi-stream-of consciousness style interspersed throughout. Her solid, seamless and detailed writing has the power to bring us into each scene..."
--Bookpleasures.com
"Often forgotten amid yellow-ribbon bumper stickers and Welcome Home ceremonies, Kristen Tsetsi's Homefront renders love and the very capacity to love as casualties of war, all in prose glittering with humility, humor and incisive detail." -Benjamin Buchholz, author of Private Soldiers
"The sheer accumulation of life detail and the interplay of vivid secondary characters, braided together with the transcribed correspondence of the lovers, force its readers to feel from the inside what the horror and the tedium of the homefront is like over time."
--Alan Davis, New Rivers Press
"Through several sharply-drawn supporting characters and scenes of daily life in a military town, the reader is drawn deeply into Mia’s psychological disconnect from her unwanted reality. Homefront reads like a long-form haiku written by Charles Bukowski in collaboration with Ann Beattie; almost every paragraph is a stand-alone gem of insight and observation." -- Rick Shefchik, journalist, award-winning columnist, and author of "Amen Corner" and "Green Monster"
"If there's a war on (and, these days, there's usually a war on), I want to be reading about it. I appreciate first person accounts, either fictionalized or not, and Kristen Tsetsi's 'Homefront,' an emotional novel about a young couple's separation when Jake is shipped to Iraq, is a worthy new entry in this category."
-- Levi Asher, Literary Kicks
"An intensely intimate and affecting story...I was 100 pages into "Homefront" before I looked up from the book."
-- Steven J. McDermott, Editor, Storyglossia
"This is a thoughtful and elegant book; the writing immersive, evocative, and polished."
-- PODler
READER REACTIONS
"Homefront is powerful."
- Andrew A., US Army Officer
"Kristen J. Tsetsi has done something few other authors have been able to; she’s captivated me with a non-genre title. 'Homefront' kept me turning pages, not because of suspense or exciting action, but because of the depth with which she explores the psyche of her narrator."
- Ian Thomas Healy, www.ianthealy.com.
"Occasionally, a book comes along that you know you will want to share before you've finished the read. 'Homefront' is such a book."
- John McDonald, Waxahachie, TX
"Tsetsi’s observations are keen, and to say that she possesses the gift of subtlety would be an understatement. Her sentences are whittled down to their essentials and yet they are loaded; not telling you much, but also telling you everything. I have read the book three times since it was released three months ago."
- Beth Kernaghan, Artist and Army wife, Fort Rucker, AL
"It's customary here, in my house, to have TV news on from around 4PM 'till when I go to bed (unless I find a good movie to watch). But I started reading 'Homefront' this morning and just now, finding time to sit and read for a while before dinner, I can't have the news on."
--L.T. Charlestown, NH
"I have not seen any book that truly explores what a person goes through when their significant other is deployed. You hear that it’s hard, but what did they go through? As someone who never had to deal with a deployment, I could only imagine it was hard. Reading 'Homefront' gave me more empathy for those who stay behind, and I was able to feel it in a way I never had before.”
– Tina D. Champlain, MN
"The characters in 'Homefront' will long outlast your reading of the book. Strongly drawn and very sympathetic, the people Kristen Tsetsi has created are strikingly memorable. Tsetsi has a unique ability to delineate both male and female characters and is a gifted observer of modern life."
- Glenn Osborn, Perrysburg, Ohio
"'Homefront' by Kristen Tsetsi is an early and important document of this aspect of an extended war of occupation in a far away foreign land."
- Jim Parks (News writer and Veteran), Waco, TX
