Little Avalanches

A Memoir

By: Becky Ellis

Narrated by: Sara Van Beckum, Steve Menasche

As a young girl, Becky is forced to hide from phantom Nazis, subjected to dental procedures without pain medication, and torn from her mother again and again. Growing up in the shadow of her father's PTSD, she wants to know what is wrong, but knows not to ask. Her father won't talk about being a Timberwolf, a unit of specially trained night fighters that went into combat first and experienced a 300 percent casualty rate. He returns home with thirteen medals and becomes a doctor, but is haunted by his past.

Seeing only his explosive and often dangerous personality, Becky distances herself from the man she wants to love. Yet, on the eve of his ninetieth birthday, when Becky looks at the vulnerable man he's become, something shifts, and she asks about the war. He breaks seventy years of silence, offering an unfiltered account of war without glory and revealing the extent of the trauma he's endured. She spends the next several years interviewing, researching, and ultimately understanding the demons she inherited. Because his story is incomplete without hers, and hers is inconceivable without his, Ellis offers both, as well as their year-long aching conversation marked by moments of redeeming grace.

With compassionate, unflinching writing, Little Avalanches reminds us that we are profoundly shaped by the secrets we keep and forever changed by the stories we share.

©2024 Becky Ellis (P)2024 Tantor

Listened to every page... and I didn't want this book to end!

Through an engaging storytelling style... Becky Ellis shines a delicate light on the dark secrets her father kept hidden from the family for decades. Her effort may now provide others with a better understanding of our own families. Thank you to her father for opening up and sharing his own stuggles. For many of us, our fathers never had the opportunity to share their stories.
I wanted to hug her when the book was over. But in the end, i think she finally got the hug she really wanted... from her father. Listening to this book impacted me more than i ever expected.

Amazing WWll stories.

WWll stories that I wish I could have heard from my own Dad before he passed.