Palmer brings wit and wisdom to her tale of love, damage and self-acceptance.
After escaping death in a school shooting, a mild-mannered woman begins to demand a little respect.
New headmistress at the Markham School Emma Dunham is beautiful and accomplished—a kind of Grace Kelly figure in the stuffy staff lounge. She is just the kind of woman speech therapist Frannie Reid would like to be, but that would require a kind of easy confidence she can’t imagine. Frannie does have a cheering team—Jill, a fellow therapist at Markham, and Lisa, a new science teacher. Their relationship is palpable—they swear and joke and snipe like real friends—and the two encourage Frannie to date since pompous Ryan, head of the history department, dumped her. On a rare faculty night out, she meets Sam. An architect working on an expansion to the school, he is handsome, has a lovely Southern drawl and really gets Frannie. It feels like kismet until the night of Emma Dunham’s birthday party at the school. Emma’s creepy husband Jamie walks in and shoots Emma in the head. He spins around and begins aiming at anyone close enough, and then Sam gets hold of the gun and shoots. Afterward Sam goes home with Frannie to change out of their bloody clothes, and they have desperate, frightened, bone-shattering, love-inducing sex. And then, they don’t see each other for a very long time. Sam is coming to terms with having killed a man (while being praised as a hero) and Frannie is wondering why the woman she wanted to emulate turned out to be an abused wife. Although the romance between Sam and Frannie has pull, Palmer spins a few enticing subplots: Frannie adopts Emma’s beautiful dog, Lisa and fellow architect Grady decide to marry after the shock of the shooting, Frannie contacts Emma’s estranged sister and finds that their childhood primed Emma for a life of abuse. All this has to happen before Frannie and Sam can decide whether their relationship can survive the shooting.
Palmer brings wit and wisdom to her tale of love, damage and self-acceptance.Pub Date: April 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-200746-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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