Next book

THAT HAIR

Heady and smart, if you can follow the novel’s complex, associative train of thought.

A half-Portuguese, half-Angolan woman uses her hair to interrogate her position between two cultures.

The hair salons in Lisbon don’t know quite what to make of Mila, who moved at 3 years old from Luanda, the capital of Angola, to Portugal and whose hair is a “rebellious mane.” She makes demoralizing visit after demoralizing visit to these salons, where her hair is “pulled…this way and that,” subjected to treatments “whose abrasive chemicals require the use of latex gloves,” or worked into weaves at “a breakneck speed over four hours” (only to come undone soon after). But in this essayistic novel, Almeida's first to be translated into English, Mila’s hair isn’t simply a matter of personal anguish. “The truth is that the story of my curly hair intersects with the story of at least two countries and, by extension, the underlying story of the relations among several continents: a geopolitics.” Indeed, interwoven seamlessly throughout are stories and memories of her family: Her Angolan grandfather’s life as a nursing student in Luanda, the smell of her Portuguese grandmother Lúcia’s hair—“Feno de Portugal soap, tobacco, and oiliness”—as a young Mila combs it, her long strolls through Oeiras, in Lisbon, with her often absent mother. What Mila seems to be revolving around with all these shifting reminiscences is the fundamental doubleness of who she is. She introduces a photographic “self-portrait”: the famous 1957 photo of Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, walking to school as white people behind her gawk and even bare their teeth. “I am all of the people in that portrait at once,” Mila declares. “The raging girls in the photo are the nervous tremor (which brings me shame) when a black man on the streetcar answers the phone, speaking loudly. ‘Shhh: pipe down,’ they say to me, I say to him, I say to myself. ‘Can’t you see the others?’ ” Almeida writes long, destabilizing, often disorienting paragraphs, where successive sentences can shift radically in time and space. But the reader is pulled along throughout by a sly, evasive humor—where unreliable memory ends, Almeida seems to say, storytelling begins.

Heady and smart, if you can follow the novel’s complex, associative train of thought.

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-947793-41-5

Page Count: 168

Publisher: Tin House

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

Categories:
Next book

THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

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

Categories:
Next book

SEE ME

More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose...

Sparks (The Longest Ride, 2013, etc.) serves up another heaping helping of sentimental Southern bodice-rippage.

Gone are the blondes of yore, but otherwise the Sparks-ian formula is the same: a decent fellow from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches falls in love with a decent girl from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches—and is still suffering the consequences. The guy is innately intelligent but too quick to throw a punch, the girl beautiful and scary smart. If you hold a fatalistic worldview, then you’ll know that a love between them can end only in tears. If you hold a Sparks-ian one, then true love will prevail, though not without a fight. Voilà: plug in the character names, and off the story goes. In this case, Colin Hancock is the misunderstood lad who’s decided to reform his hard-knuckle ways but just can’t keep himself from connecting fist to face from time to time. Maria Sanchez is the dedicated lawyer in harm’s way—and not just because her boss is a masher. Simple enough. All Colin has to do is punch the partner’s lights out: “The sexual harassment was bad enough, but Ken was a bully as well, and Colin knew from his own experience that people like that didn’t stop abusing their power unless someone made them. Or put the fear of God into them.” No? No, because bound up in Maria’s story, wrinkled with the doings of an equally comely sister, there’s a stalker and a closet full of skeletons. Add Colin’s back story, and there’s a perfect couple in need of constant therapy, as well as a menacing cop. Get Colin and Maria to smooching, and the plot thickens as the storylines entangle. Forget about love—can they survive the evil that awaits them out in the kudzu-choked woods?

More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose corn syrup, stickily sweet but irresistible.

Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-4555-2061-9

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

Categories:
Close Quickview