Lopsided, thin, whiny novel about young love in New York City and middle-aged widowhood in the south of France: the second adult offering (Save Johanna!, 1981) from the creator of the Sweet Valley High series. Anna Green is engaged to Steven Buchwald and looking forward to a comfortable if conventional life as a rich New York matron when she meets Nick Devlin, editor of the advertising newspaper where she's just been given her first job. Nick falls in love with her at first sight, but Anna takes a little longer—four weeks, to be exact—but soon she's making torrid love with him, while still going ahead with her plans for her wedding. The story of their courtship, her reluctance to give up the good life with Steven, and her 11th-hour decision to fly to her true love is interspersed with long kvetches about Anna's present life in a villa in France. Now Mrs. Devlin, widowed and the mother of a grown daughter, she is lonely, can't speak the language, and feels at the mercy of hostile or dishonest tradespeople. In the years between her marriage to Nick and the present, she's made something of a fortune for herself writing lyrics to the rock songs of Wicked, a male superstar. But now she can no longer write, preoccupied as she claims to be by her grief and by her disorientation in her new home. She thinks maybe she needs to become sexually active again, if not with a man then with a zucchini—there's a slapstick scene in the local market with her knocking over a barrow full of courgettes in her search for the vegetable of her dreams. The real substance of the story—her life with Nick, her motherhood, his slow death from cancer—is largely a lacuna between Anna's tedious wafflings during their courtship, and her equally tedious complaints about how tough it is to get good help, find a lover, and make friends in the south of France. Hard to believe, even harder to care.
Pub Date: Jan. 17, 1994
ISBN: 0-517-59682-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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