“In a world where few subjects are taboo, the impact of war on veterans and their families, remains largely hidden from public view.” — Karestan C. Koenen, Ph.D., Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health
Coming March 12 2024 from
The other half of the story
LITTLE AVALANCHES
A memoir by
BECKY ELLIS
“For any of you who have experienced multigenerational trauma in your family and you want to break the cycle… The reviews are absolutely bananas for this book. It’s clearly touched a ton of people. You've given people a framework and you’ve given them a catharsis, it’s also riveting and you are entertained, and we need that.”
— Jillian Michaels, Keeping It Real
“A bracing exploration of intergenerational trauma and the power of honest dialogue to defang it… Ellis expertly balances pain with compassion as she plunges into the depths of her father’s PTSD armed with frank and flinty prose. It’s a radiant and healing account.”
— Publishers Weekly
“A moving, melancholy, and ultimately cathartic examination of wartime trauma across generations…. Ellis writes eloquently and poignantly... meticulously depicting the painful episodes of his grueling tour of duty. “One story at a time,” she writes, “he revealed himself to me.” Wartime veterans and their children will find this uncommonly strong debut a meaningful reading experience, and general readers will be moved by the story.
—Kirkus Reviews
“It was the "good" war… we didn't ask, we never knew, what the war had done to them. Pitch perfect story telling..”
—Lauren Kessler, award-winning author of FREE: Two Years, Six Lives, and the Long Journey Home
“Ellis has produced a masterpiece. There’s no other book out there like this.”
-– Dale Maharidge, Pulitzer-Prize winning author
“In a world where few subjects are taboo, the impact of war on veterans and their families, remains largely hidden from public view...Anyone who wants to write a memoir needs to read Little Avalanches.”
—Jennifer Lauck, New York Times bestselling author of Blackbird
Official Little Avalanches Launch Teaser
Longtime Costco book buyer & literary tastemaker, Pennie Clark Ianniciello made Little Avalanches her March @PenniesPick. Interview here.
Becky Ellis on why Little Avalanches has been called “the other half of the story”.
reveals the lifelong struggles of the families of traumatized veterans
Joins the minority of war memoirs written by women
Official Little Avalanches Trailer
As featured in
“Even as a child, Becky Ellis knew her father was not a safe guy to be around. He took her and her siblings to nude beaches when Ellis was 7. On a boating holiday, he let her 5-year-old sister drink as much champagne as she wanted and then didn’t monitor her. “My brother and I made sure she didn't jump out into the lake in the middle of night and drown,” says Ellis. After her mother left him, he’d come over and bang on the door and drunkenly demand to see the kids, until the cops turned up.”
— Belinda Luscombe, excerpted from How To Reconcile With An Estranged Family Member, TIME, Nov. 7, 2023
Rarely does a memoir rectify history
rarer still the work with the power to swerve future histories yet to be written
a tender, curious woman Uncovers the TRUTH about her dehumanized SOLDIER dad
her search for SELF in pREVIOUS generations heals A FAMILY TRAUMA
Becky Ellis in conversation with Blackbird author & podcast host, Jennifer Lauck about writing Little Avalanches. Lauck: “Anyone who wants to write a memoir needs to read it.”
LITTLE AVALANCHES is a gorgeously written memoir of breathtaking scope that propels readers from the beaches of California in the early 70’s to the battlefields of wartime Germany. Becky Ellis is the daughter of a highly decorated combat sergeant from the 104th Infantry Division, the heroic, decimated Timberwolves. As a young girl, she is forced to hide from phantom Nazis, subjected to dental procedures without pain medication, and exposed to life-threatening risk at sea.
A furtive thread of war is woven into our cultural fabric. While stitching one generation to the next, it eludes detection. The families of traumatized soldiers refuse to be bound to the suffering of the past, much less pass it on to their children. Like everyone they strive for success and belonging, but they do so from behind a line of secrecy that ultimately leaves them separate and lonely. By unravelling the thread of war that runs through her family, Becky Ellis crosses that line of secrecy, not just for herself, but for millions of military families for whom LITTLE AVALANCHES will expose a deep truth: no less than their veteran partners, the wives and children of traumatized soldiers fight a lifelong battle to recover their humanity.
The magic of LITTLE AVALANCHES is in the paradox of a tender, curious woman searching through generations of family history to uncover the truth of her brutalized and dehumanized father, and the compassion she marshals to escape his endless war and bring them to relational safety. By juxtaposing resistance and reverence, conflict and empathy, she brings us to a deeper understanding of what it means to be human and complete. Her account of a family redeemed is the “half of the story” that could have only been written by a woman.
EARLY PRAISE
“A masterpiece. There’s no other book out there like this.”
-– Dale Maharidge, Pulitzer-Prize winning author
"Literary sirens on. A searing look at estrangement from a parent, with emphasis on healing through open, honest dialogue."
— Bethanne Patrick, critic, Los Angeles Times Books
“Like Ellis and her Dad, many people would love to find a way to restore contact.”
— Belinda Luscombe, TIME
“Limited attention has been paid to World War Two veterans struggles to integrate once returning home. The stories of the women and children who lived with these men and suffered from their struggles are strikingly absent… A roadmap for the journey from victim to hero, from pain to compassion, and from isolation to connection.”
— Karestan C. Koenen, Ph.D., Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Director, Biology of Trauma Initiative, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
“Ellis is a brave and tireless storyteller who crosses an emotional and psychological minefield between herself and her war hero father. She emerges victorious on the other side, with childhood demons slayed and in possession of a mature compassion for herself and her father. This memoir reads like a novel. You won’t be able to put it down.”
— Jennifer Lauck, New York Times bestselling author of Blackbird
“Little Avalanches is a lifeline to families struggling to understand why Grunts come home and wound those they love. While there is no one truth in combat, only unique truths of the same experience, Becky Ellis has written a universal truth about the beast that prolonged combat unleashes and has shown us a way to share our stories and begin to heal. I saw both of my daughters’ faces in these pages and am grateful to Ellis for telling the story nobody else would.”
— Cpl. Robert Topping, United States Marine Corps, Grunt-1968-1970; 3rd Marine Division, 3rd Marine Regiment, 2nd Battalion, Fox Company, 1st Platoon
Book tour
A Great Good Place for Books Oakland, CA
April 4th
Pages Manhattan Beach
March 28th
McMenamins History Pub
Portland, OR
March 25th
Books & Books Miami
March 22
Barrel of Books & Games Mount Dora, Florida
March 21
Diesel; A Bookstore
Del Mar, CA
March 14th
Powell’s Books Portland (Cedar Hills Crossing) March 12
Madame Foucault’s Portland - December 17
