A richly plotted, entertaining, if credulity-streching, tale follows Charles “Chucky” Cronin, an Irish-Catholic Chicagoan, during his service in postwar Germany. In a lively and engaging early section, Greeley (Irish Lace, 1996, etc.) sketches Chucky’s Chicago youth with a casual facility, featuring his family, and particularly his parents, April and John, and their Depression-strained but durable love for one another. With sprightly doses of “Irish” family humor, and a series of misadventures that recall the work of John Irving in their unexpected audacity and originality, Greeley moves the tale along, writing with an uncritical fondness of the period. Chucky rescues his prom date from drowning, and leads his football team to victory in the final seconds of the Big Came, but neither effort earns him much pride: he routinely dismisses these events as the result of luck. Drafted toward the end of WWII, and sent to Germany as a member of the Constabulary—a sort of occupation police force—he falls in love with Trudi, a woman with a misleadingly Nazi-tinged past; happens upon a spiritual partnership with Brigitta, who awaits the return of her husband Kurt from a Russian prison camp; and discovers a black-market overseen by shady Americans, which he single-handedly unmasks. He also spirits Trudi and her family away from the reaches of the Constabulary. All of this is suspenseful fun, but Chucky’s unrelenting self-deprecation, his wearying insistence that he’s just an innocent rube before God, seems false, and finally taxes the reader’s credulity. And when Chucky eventually upsets all evil, beds the girl, affirms America’s generosity, becomes rich (as do his parents), and gets a promotion, that credulity is exhausted. Greeley’s familiar spiritual concerns—human guilt, one’s relation to God, and personal integrity—dominate Chucky’s reactions to these vigorously plotted events. But the incidents seem to leave his character untouched, making for a rather unmoving coming-of-age-tale. ($100,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-86571-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
