A colorful tale about colorful characters in colorful places and times. Vintage McCullough.
Back in her native Australia after her notable chronicles of the ancient Romans, McCullough depicts a brilliant man who has the golden touch in everything but his marriage.
In a big sweep that covers much of the globe during the late 1800s, McCullough (The October Horse, 2002, etc.) introduces Alexander Kinross and the woman, Elizabeth, he sends for and marries. A man who never knew his father, Alexander leaves Scotland as a teenager in the mid-1800s determined to prove the local bigots wrong about his abilities. He moves to England and studies engineering, then goes on to California, where, with his nose for gold, he makes a bundle in the Gold Rush. Next is Australia, where he discovers more gold and establishes Kinross, a model town. Now immensely rich, and the owner of a magnificent house, he sends for Elizabeth, last seen as a child in Scotland, to be his bride. At 16, Elizabeth is too frightened of her dour skinflint of a father to disobey his orders to leave for Australia, but from the moment she meets Alexander, she’s repelled. Nearly losing her life in the process, she bears him two daughters, brilliant Nell and brain-damaged Anna. Told that Elizabeth should not have more children, Alexander spends more time with Ruby, his mistress, the woman he really loves. Paradoxically, Ruby, a former madam and the mother of brilliant half-Chinese Lee, becomes Elizabeth’s best friend and helps her deal with adolescent Anna’s rape, the murder of Anna’s rapist by her Chinese nurse, and the birth of Anna’s child. Though Alexander becomes an international tycoon, Elizabeth remains unimpressed. Only Lee, a few years younger than she and back from studying in England, touches her heart. But Elizabeth still has much to endure before Alexander, a fundamentally generous man, realizes the unwitting harm he has done to her and makes spectacular, if tragic, amends.
A colorful tale about colorful characters in colorful places and times. Vintage McCullough.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-684-85330-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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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