Come to think of it, this feels more like a factory product than a book as such—competent enough, and resembling a book in...
A high-toned neogothic yarn by veteran author Steel (Legacy, 2010, etc.), who owns the genre.
You’ve got to pity one-percenter, almost-septuagenerian Olivia Grayson, who runs a fashion and lifestyle-accessory empire called The Factory—“an empire that had reached around the world, and an industry that no one could compete with, although many tried.” She’s quite staggeringly rich, and so are her children, whom she’s co-opted into various positions involving finance and art, son Phillip the former, son John the latter, for Phillip had ”his father’s steady head for finance,” while “John had inherited Olivia’s innate artistic sense for design.” (A philosophical question: Can something innate be inherited?) But what of the daughters? One is a clinger, afraid of her own shadow, the other resolutely independent and wanting nothing to do with Mom and all her mounds of cash. So what happens when Mom finally hits 70, the family is assembled, various spouses get in on the act and the secrets begin to spill out? Ah, there’s the Steel magic, all regret, gnashing of teeth and tears shed into very expensive glasses of champagne; it ain’t King Lear, but it’s fraught with the dynamite of family dynamics anyway. Can the children pull themselves together enough to keep things going for their children? Can the Empress Olivia keep the empire going? Will The Factory keep on manufacturing things that no one needs but everyone wants?
Come to think of it, this feels more like a factory product than a book as such—competent enough, and resembling a book in form, but with a certain emptiness at its heart. Still, if you care about the tribulations of the very rich, this is your book.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-34320-6
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2012
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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