In a sequel to Portofino (1992), Schaeffer offers an uneven, if sweet-natured, comic tale of a boy's struggle for independence from his often-loony missionary family. Fifteen-year-old Calvin Becker is burdened with two squabbling, goody-goody older sisters, a volatile, quixotic father who's often stricken by dark periods the family calls ``Moods,'' and an emotionally overwrought mother who instructs Calvin to pray for wet dreams so he won't be tempted to masturbate. The Beckers run L'Arche, a Calvinist Presbyterian mission in Switzerland; when the supply of converts runs low, they turn their attention to ``saving'' handicapped children from the home next door. Calvin's only friend, through all this, is Jean-Pierre, a French boy with cerebral palsy who shares with home-schooled Calvin a near-inability to read; Calvin's only true comfort, it seems, is spinning elaborate fantasies about Jennifer, the beautiful English girl he sees for two weeks every year when the Beckers vacation in Italy. Calvin's mom is always crowing about having rescued his father from a coarse, heathen, working-class background, so it's little surprise that when Dad's mean-tempered mother, who spews bad language, racial slurs, and blasphemy in abundance, breaks her hip and comes to stay, the family is thrown into an uproar. Unhinged by stress, Calvin's father manages to escalate an obscure theological dispute with a neighbor into a full-scale feud that almost gets the Beckers expelled from Switzerland. Just when the fracas has settled down, Grandma contracts pneumonia, and when Calvin, who aspires to be a doctor, learns that his parents don't plan to treat her, he smuggles veterinary penicillin to her and saves her life—creating a strange bond between the two and providing the catalyst for Calvin's realization that it's finally time for him to escape for keeps. Good material, though with jokes that are often overplayed and a scattered, episodic structure that slows the story's drive.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-425-15776-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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