Memories: Chronicles of a Grateful Life

Of her own memories, novelist Ellen Hopkins states, “Now that I have opened that bottle of memories they’re pouring out like wine, crimson and bitter sweet.” So it is with Vashti Ataya’s “MEMORIES, Chronicles of a Grateful Life.” As a military dependent, Vashti’s formative years were shaped in rural Oklahoma, Germany, and Panama, places and spaces of extraordinary memories.

Her “bottle of memories” from early childhood to young adulthood slakes one’s nostalgia for a more innocent time as vi...