McGhee is a gifted writer, but clever word play and a plethora of pointed metaphors are not enough to bring her fictional...
A wheelchair–bound teenager learns to survive the damage he’s suffered, emotional as well as physical, in this slight but highly wrought story from McGhee (Was It Beautiful?, 2003, etc.).
While his father sleeps or drinks, 16-year-old paraplegic Joseph spends his days working at a bakery/café with 17-year-old Zap, the owner’s son. Zap's Pied Piper charisma works on all the customers but Enzo, a nine-year-old girl who appears to have nothing to do all day but hang out at the bakery and bicker with Zap, to whom she directs an intense sibling love-hate. Zap, who gives nicknames to everyone, calls Joseph “Flying Joseph” and tells Enzo that Joseph is a hero. Enzo, who calls herself Mighty Thor, desperately wants Joseph to be more, a superhero with superhuman healing powers. Joseph denies any heroism in himself. He also refuses to discuss how he ended up in a wheelchair and why he has left his mother in Utica, N.Y., to live in Minneapolis with his father, a functional alcoholic who works nights as the oven man at the bakery. The story of Joseph’s accident gradually takes shape. When his father left a year earlier, Joseph had to take care of his increasingly unbalanced mother. He had no room for friends or a life of his own. In a moment of derangement, his mother broke his spine by inadvertently knocking him from the top steps of a sliding board into a cement wading pool filled only with fresh snow. In the romanticized, claustrophobic world of Joseph, Zap and Enzo, adults are generally absent and/or untrustworthy, so children must look after each other. The jarring contradiction is that Joseph’s great sorrow is the loss of his mother, who now resides in a mental hospital.
McGhee is a gifted writer, but clever word play and a plethora of pointed metaphors are not enough to bring her fictional world to life.Pub Date: March 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-42592-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
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
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
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