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LEAVING LUCY PEAR

Name: LEAVING LUCY PEAR
Author: Anna Solomon
ISBN: 978-1-594-63265-5

by Anna Solomon ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 26, 2016

Slow-movement storytelling: fully-fleshed, compassionate, and satisfying.

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The abandonment of a newborn child in a pear orchard opens an intense tale of choices and consequences which, despite its early-20th-century setting, has the capacious feel of a Victorian novel.

Set on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, in the 1910s and '20s, Solomon's (The Little Bride, 2011) penetrating second work of fiction connects Irish and Jewish, workers and bluebloods, the fertile and the barren. Events spring from an abrupt sexual act that leaves wealthy, musical, Jewish Bea Haven pregnant. Sent to live with relatives in the country until the baby is born and she can take up her place at Radcliffe, 18-year-old Bea is repelled at the chilly prospect of placing her child in an orphanage and instead leaves the girl in the path of Irish trespassers who annually strip her uncle’s fruit trees. So the baby—in future known as Lucy Pear—is spirited away by Emma Murphy to join her brood of nine children. Solomon returns repeatedly to Bea’s fragile psychology in the ensuing decade: her breakdown, her withdrawal, her failing marriage to handsome, gay Albert Cohn, her sadness for “all the lives that might have been hers.” Meanwhile, Lucy grows up visibly different from her adoptive family, while Emma begins an affair with a local businessman and finds herself working, briefly, for Bea, whom she recognizes as Lucy’s mother. As background, Solomon introduces Prohibition and the Sacco and Vanzetti case, yet the novel seems to belong to an earlier era of storytelling, focused on the inner lives and challenges of a community, especially the womenfolk. Repeatedly opting for the less predictable outcome, Solomon reaches resolutions marked with the same reflective maturity as the rest of this solidly absorbing novel.

Slow-movement storytelling: fully-fleshed, compassionate, and satisfying.

Pub Date: July 26, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-594-63265-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BOOK OF V.
by Anna Solomon

- BOOK REVIEW
LABOR DAY
edited by Eleanor Henderson ; Anna Solomon

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.