I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review. All opinions are my own. 

Author Luanne Castle shares the trauma and path to forgiveness she undertook in the book “Scrap: Salvaging a Family.”

The Synopsis

The hybrid flash memoir Scrap: Salvaging a Family explores the stain of childhood fear and anxiety on the adult spirit and the experience of reconciling with an aging or dying parent. A daughter has grown up in a household with an angry and abusive father. He keeps the secret of his biological father’s identity from his daughter for decades. When the elderly man faces his mortality, he finally names his father. The more the daughter learns about her father’s early life and origins, the more she understands him which leads to forgiveness for the past.

Borne of shame and trauma, the secrets uncovered in Luanne Castle’s hybrid memoir reveal her father’s complicated childhood and the impact it had on their relationship. Told in brief, strikingly vivid fragments, and through various perspectives and forms, the book as a whole presents a deeply moving and unforgettable account. We readers are privileged to bear witness to this emotional excavation, one that ultimately reminds us that love is powerful even when it’s painful and that forgiveness is the only way forward. Scrap: Salvaging a Family is a gorgeous and brilliantly original collection. I highly recommend it.

—Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works

The vignettes in Castle’s Scrap are beautifully rendered. With house as vessel, we are voyeurs through her domesticity, the skilled lens of speaker Luanne’s traumas and perseverance as she navigates the rawness and fragility of youth. The book is both powerful and arresting–Castle is a deft miniaturist–each story etched with a fine blade, yet a delicate touch. Scrap is a collection of constellations of the ordinary.

—Robert Vaughan, Editor-in-Chief of Bending Genres, author of ASKEW.

Luanne Castle’s Scrap is a memoir in flash. In flashes might be a more accurate term. This is a family story told in bursts of memory and image, puzzle pieces waiting to connect. It’s a young girl’s coming of age, navigating a path to womanhood out of hand-sewn dresses, gym class movies shown behind closed doors, stacks of moldering girlie magazines discovered at the dump. A girl living in the shadow of her father’s anger, violent and unpredictable as the tornadoes her family hides from. Behind the father’s anger, a missing piece. A birth certificate hinting at bastard. A hole where a father should be, a “space of unknowingness” both child and father must try to fill.

This lyrical, beautifully imagistic work is both an exploration of the long roots of generational trauma and identity erasure and a vivid look back at growing up female in mid-century America.

—Kathryn Kulpa, author of A Map of Lost Places

THE REVIEW

This is such a powerful and engaging read. The author does such a stellar job of capturing an emotional and personal narrative while also discussing their relationship with their abusive father and narrowly finding the path to forgiveness through exploring his own past. The balance between memoir style, essays, and flash fiction with hints of poetry and poetic imagery in the author’s writing style kept me, as a reader, invested in the book both emotionally and mentally. 

This was also a story of identity for the author. While confronting a troubled childhood with an abusive parent is definitely center stage in this book, the author navigates the need to understand herself by looking at the past and filling in missing pieces from both of her parents and their backgrounds. The emotional impact of the author’s experience and memories will resonate with readers on a personal level, keeping them invested as the book progresses.

THE VERDICT

Honest, memorable, and engaging, Author Luanne Castle’s “Scrap” is a must-read non-fiction memoir and flash narrative of essays that you really will not want to miss. The complex, emotional relationship the author explores between herself and her father is upfront and truthful, and the level of detail and immersion the reader feels as they experience the author’s life firsthand through these words will resonate with readers and keep them eager to delve deeper until the book’s end. If you haven’t yet, please be sure to grab your copy today!

Rating: 10/10

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Luanne Castle’s hybrid flash memoir, Scrap: Salvaging a Family (ELJ Editions 2026) has received a starred review from Kirkus. Her story, “Garden Seasons,” was selected for Best Microfiction 2026. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Copper Nickel, River Teeth, Your Impossible Voice, JMWW, Grist, Fourteen Hills, Verse Daily, Disappointed Housewife, Lunch Ticket, Saranac Review, Pleiades, Cleaver, Moon City, Moon Park, Anti-Heroin Chic, Bending Genres, BULL, The Mackinaw, The Ekphrastic Review, Phoebe, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Gone Lawn, Burningword, Superstition Review, One Art, Roi Fainéant, Dribble Drabble, Flash Boulevard, O:JA&L, Sheila-Na-Gig, Thimble, Antigonish Review, Longridge, Paragraph Planet, Six Sentences, Gooseberry Pie, Switch, and Ginosko. She has published four award-winning poetry collections.  Her ekphrastic flash and poetry collection Hunting the Cosmos is forthcoming from Shanti Arts in fall 2026. Her mixed-media art has been showcased at Rogue Agent, Does It Have Pockets, Ink in Thirds, Watershed Review, Wildscape, Mad Swirl, Raw Lit, and Thimble. 

Luanne has been a Fellow at the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California, Riverside. She studied English and Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside (PhD); Western Michigan University (MFA); and Stanford University (Certificate). Luanne lives with her husband and four cats in Arizona along a wash that wildlife use as a thoroughfare.