Review: Tale offers insight into a son’s struggle in ‘Breakfast at the Good Hope Home”

Author Mike Bayles, a lifelong Midwesterner who attended college at both Iowa State and Northern Iowa, has penned a fictionalized account of losing his father to Alzheimer's disease. 'Breakfast at the Good Hope Home” is a tale a son's struggle to come to terms with loss and to find a way forward. The brief book, published by 918studio Press in the Quad Cities, is a combination of poetry and prose. Bayles infuses both forms of writing with emotion that seems both honest and heartfelt.

Arguable, Bayles is a better prose stylist than poet. The prose in the book captures scenes of loss and confusion - for both father and son. Here are opening paragraphs:

'Fred, my dad, thinks he is still in the house. He gets out of his chair and shuffles across the floor. I watch. I wonder if I have to tell him to eat.

'Last night I barely slept after the court and his conservator placed him in the Good Hope Home. What had been a matter of managing family finances had become a matter of my father's state of mind after the conservator had said that my father didn't seem to understand. Now the house I knew and his life were falling apart, as was mine.”

While that last sentence is somewhat awkwardly constructed, the rest of the passage - mostly short sentences until the longer penultimate sentence gives a sense of how close things are to spirally out of control - thrusts us immediately into the narrator's changed world.

By contrast, many of the poems in the book feel like formal exercises rather than true investigations into emotion. Still, there is an honesty to them that enhances the story.

'Breakfast at the Good Hope Home” offers a short reading experience that may well linger with readers for a long time.