A lighthearted Mission Impossible for feisty senior citizens bent on social justice.
When a group of senior citizens retrofits a garbage truck to siphon millions out of a major Swedish bank, the authorities are left clueless: The League of Pensioners strikes again!
Martha and her retired friends return in this, Ingelman-Sundberg’s (The Little Old Lady Who Struck Lucky Again, 2017, etc.) third installment in the League of Pensioners series. Martha, Brains, Anna-Greta, Christina, and Rake continue scheming to raise funds to distribute to the hardworking poor and to build their dream village for retired folk. Of course, their fundraising methods remain illegal, but it's hard to blame them for targeting ageist, exorbitantly wealthy, tax-evading criminals. In addition to (somewhat smelly) millions of kroner, they have collected diamonds, jewelry, and gold bars. Eager to distribute the money to the underpaid and underappreciated, the gang opens a restaurant on a barge. Patrons are encouraged to sit at the singles table to play a dating app designed by Anna-Greta. Whether or not they find a love match, everyone leaves with a parting gift: cash. The cost of doing business, however, is outwitting local gangsters, Russian oligarchs, and Blomberg, the retired police detective who failed to nab the pensioners in Ingelman-Sundberg’s first two books. The oldsters are spry—practicing yoga and gymnastics—and sly—eluding villains at every turn with Anna-Greta's crack computer skills, Brains’ inventions, and Martha's savvy acting chops. The escapades escalate quickly to riskier, more profitable hijinks. Extortion in Sweden, stolen luxury yachts in San Tropez, money laundering in the Cayman Islands: Ingelman-Sundberg keeps the pace fast with just enough suspense—can the gang pull off this caper, too?—to make each success exhilarating. So it's easy to sympathize with Martha's burgeoning career as Miss Marple's spry, scheming, Swedish cousin. Poor Brains may never tie her down in matrimony.
A lighthearted Mission Impossible for feisty senior citizens bent on social justice.Pub Date: June 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-269233-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
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