An ambitious tale that doesn’t quite deliver.
A reissue of Clarke’s (Our Lady of the Ice, 2015, etc.) 2013 novel about the relationship between a roboticist’s daughter and the android she’s known since childhood.
Cat Novak is a little girl when her father brings a stranger named Finn home to act as her personal tutor. Despite her age, Cat knows that something is different about the new arrival, but her parents avoid her questions about him. At first, she draws her own conclusion from what she knows about Finn (he doesn’t eat, he doesn’t get cold or tired, his eyes shine silver in the dark) and thinks he’s a ghost. She cares for him anyway, even after he reveals the truth: he’s an android—the most advanced one to ever exist. As time passes, Finn continues to live in the Novak household, acting as her father’s lab assistant. Even though she knows he’s not human, Cat’s feelings for Finn deepen as she becomes an adult, leading her to question just how sentient he is: does he care for her? Can he care for her? When tragedy upends her life, she turns to Finn for consolation—a choice that sets them on a path that will alter both their lives in unexpected ways. Although this setup may sound like a girl-meets-robot romance novel, this love story is set in a firmly science-fictional setting. Much of Clarke’s worldbuilding has a very light and deft touch, putting the story in a near-future version of the United States as the world rebuilds after a series of environmental crises. But, at times, the detail is too scant—for instance, it’s never completely clear how many other androids there are or how exactly they differ from Finn in terms of appearance or self-awareness. The humans sometimes feel lacking in detail, as well: Cat makes some terrible decisions with her life, but when she finally becomes conscious of the inner conflicts that drove her to her bad choices, it feels forced and unnatural, resulting in a rather unsatisfying character arc.
An ambitious tale that doesn’t quite deliver.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4814-7529-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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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