Gauzy romancer Bradford (Angel, 1993, etc.) offers a middling grabber in which a woman's great loves and happy life are destroyed by violence and death, and she begins the long climb back. Mallory (``Mal'') Keswick is blissfully married to English Andrew and is the mother of preschool twins. The family retreat from New York City, where Andrew is an ad exec, is ``Indian Meadows,'' a classic colonial house in northwestern Connecticut. In 1988, the Keswicks will have been married ten years and are much in love; the twins are adorable; the house and grounds are exquisite- -of a ``gentle serenity,'' Mal thinks. Life is perfect. Then there's a brief trip to London and Claridges, with their suite sporting a fireplace and a baby grand. Life is indeed fine. Trying for a baby and wondering whether Mal's archaeologist father (separated from her mother for ages) will find another mate, and why lovely, kind Diana, Andrew's mother, doesn't remarry, is about all there is to ponder family-wise. From London, the pair visit Diana in her 1563 estate in Yorkshire, where Mal discovers a Tudor- era diary. Then home for Christmas. But in that 1988 December, the unthinkable happens: In one insane instant, Mal's family is gone, shot dead by carjackers. In her agony, Mal plans suicide, but eventually she will be forced to fight through her grief and live again. Along the way, there will be encouragement from Diana—but also the dear ghostly presences of those she has lost. At the close there is a new career and the promise of a new relationship. The sunshine half of this novel is a fun glide through Beautiful Living, and the dark stuff has a weeper potential for the susceptible. Stronger and simpler than Bradford's recent others. (Literary Guild main selection; $450,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017723-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
IN THE NEWS
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
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