Some Things That Meant the World to Me

Starred review from March 16, 2009
Mohr's first novel is biting and heartbreaking, a piercing look at the indelible scars a violent past has left on a young man named Rhonda. In the mental hospital where Rhonda spent his teenage years, a doctor he refers to as Angel-Hair diagnoses him with depersonalization, a disorder he uses to reconfigure the traumatic events of his life and render them in vividly surreal terms. To withstand the frequent absences of his alcoholic mother and her boyfriend's abuse, Rhonda imagines his childhood home in Arizona as a living thing, where rooms stretch and move, and desert wildlife wanders the halls. The disturbing narrative engine—Rhonda's renaming and reimagining of the world around him to fit into his damaged logic—keeps the story creepily moving as it touches on homebrew prison wine and Rhonda's friendship with his childhood self, little-Rhonda. Mohr uses punchy, tightly wound prose to pull readers into a nightmarish landscape, but he never loses the heart of his story; it's as touching as it is shocking, even if the ending's a smidge sappy.