A novel of grief, love, and truth that offers insights about a family and a satisfying resolution.
A daughter comes to terms with family secrets as she deals with the effects of two tragedies from New York’s recent history.
In this novel, Impellizzeri (Lawyer Interrupted, 2016, etc.) follows two parallel narratives, those of Lu Roselli, dealing with the aftermath of a disaster and unraveling family mysteries, and her mother, Mari Guarez Roselli, a Guatemalan immigrant thinking back over her life while trapped in a coma. In 2012, Lu, ambivalent about a planned trip to her mother’s homeland, misses her flight, which crashes into her Queens neighborhood shortly after takeoff, leaving Mari injured and unconscious. Lu deals with her survivor’s guilt—an emotion she has lived with for more than a decade after her father and twin sister died on 9/11—while waiting to see if Mari will recover. Lu makes plans for the baby she did not know that her mother was carrying and sorts through the growing riddles of her family history and her complicated mother-daughter relationship. As Lu’s narrative progresses, the chapters alternate with those told from Mari’s perspective, flashbacks to her experiences in Guatemala and New York that serve to answer the questions Lu raises. Lu eventually travels to Guatemala, where she meets the nun who tells her the story Mari is revealing to the reader and also meets a man who becomes the first friend she has made in years. Impellizzeri draws on Guatemalan traditions to develop the book’s recurring motifs, particularly the practice of sharing worries with tiny dolls and the Mayan calendar projection that the end of the world will occur in December 2012, demonstrating a solid knowledge of the country’s history and culture. Thanks to Mari’s narration, the reader ends up with a more complete picture of the Roselli family than Lu does, an unusual choice but one that makes for an emotionally rewarding conclusion. The prose is serviceable, and the plot, though driven by complex layers of feelings and relationships, is fast-paced and not unnecessarily complicated.
A novel of grief, love, and truth that offers insights about a family and a satisfying resolution.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-942545-65-1
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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