Author Review: Scott Driscoll

Are Three some things worth risking everything for? Are there some things that have too high of a price? In Scott Driscoll's Novel "Better You Go Home" he answers these questions from the viewpoint of not only a man in search of a lost home from his childhood, but lost family, history, and maybe even his own life?
The Main Character,Charles Lenoch,  needs a kidney, he needs to find the truth of his father's escape from Checkylslovakia in 1938, and he needs to find his half sister before his kindney's fail.
As a diabetic who has gone through kidney transplant, pancreas transplant, blindness and the other trials of the disease, I connected with this character. I know the pain, struggle, exhaustion, and depression that can accompany critical and permanent illness.
While these aspects of Friscoll's main character added urgency to the story, it was the enviroment of post communist Checkylslovakia that kept me in the story. The fear, paranoia, bitterness, and even the blooning hope felt very genuine throughout the telling of this story. The advice to go home permeated the checkylslvakian's  advice to littner. His passion to do just that while remaining in Checkylslovakia was an interesting juxta-position in the novel. Going home becomes the remaining desire of each character as they explore the true path leading them there.
Home is never so distant nor cherished as it is when you are there and still can't find your way back to your family.
"Better you go home" is a tragic tale of loss and oppression punctuated by the deeper understanding of who and what home and family really are.

 Scott Driscoll, an award-winning instructor (the University of
Washington, Educational Outreach award for Excellence in Teaching
in the Arts and Humanities 2006), holds an MFA from the University of
Washington and has been teaching creative writing for the University of
Washington Extension for seventeen years.
Driscoll makes his living as a writer and teacher. While finishing Better
You Go Home—a novel that has been several years in the making and which
grew out of the exploration of the Czech side of his family in the 1990s after
Eastern Europe became liberated—Driscoll kept busy freelancing stories to
a variety of magazines, both commercial and literary. He most often writes
feature stories on subjects ranging from health to philanthropy to education
to general reporting for Alaska and Horizon Airlines Magazines, but he also
does profiles and book reviews, including an October 2010 profile for Ferrari
Magazine 11, and a July/August ’08 profile in Poets and Writers Magazine.
Driscoll’s short stories and narrative essays have been published
extensively in literary journals and anthologies, including Image Magazine,
Far From Home (a Seal Press anthology), Ex-Files: New Stories About Old
Flames (a Context Books fiction anthology featuring high-profile writers such
as David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, and Junot Diaz), The Seattle Review,
Crosscurrents, Cimarron Review, The South Dakota Review, Gulfstream,
American Fiction ’88 and others.
Driscoll has been awarded seven Society of Professional Journalists
awards, most recently in 2009 for social issues reporting, and including best
education reporting and general reporting 2004. His narrative essay about
his daughter’s coming of age was cited in the Best American Essays, 1998, and
while in the MFA program, he won the University of Washington’s Milliman
Award for Fiction (1989).
You can find Driscoll on the Web at www.scott-driscoll.com