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CONFESSIONS OF A WILD CHILD

Even the staunchest fans of the Santangelo family may be disappointed with this rather thin addition to the saga.

Collins (The Power Trip, 2013, etc.) returns with the story of her beloved Lucky’s teenage years. 

Growing up in the lap of luxury isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Despite living in a palace replete with tennis courts and servants to attend to her every whim, Lucky realizes that she and her brother, Dario, are just prisoners in a posh jail. Certainly her mobster father, Gino, wants to keep his children safe (after all, their mother was murdered in the swimming pool), but at 15, Lucky is already champing at the bit to live a little more on the wild side. Ironically, being sent to an elite boarding school in Switzerland is her big chance. At L’Evier, she meets Olympia Stanislopoulos, who quickly initiates her into the dark arts of smoking, drinking and sneaking out to meet boys. Sexually curious, Lucky is eager to practice “almost.” Soon enough, Lucky is kicked out of school, angering Gino, who ships her off to another school, where the shenanigans resume. Lucky stews over her crush on Marco (her father’s driver), Gino indulges in an affair with a movie star (the delightfully named Marabelle Blue), Dario begins a potentially dangerous affair, and Olympia drags Lucky into more trouble. Despite all the (not particularly explicit) action, Lucky’s tale has a fairly flat plotline. Part of the trouble in building tension lies with Lucky’s own gimlet-eyed stoicism. She is, indeed, her father’s daughter, and nothing will distract her from her ultimate goal of becoming Gino’s successor. Even the potentially catastrophic arranged marriage to a senator’s son is met with bemused calculation rather than horror.

Even the staunchest fans of the Santangelo family may be disappointed with this rather thin addition to the saga.

Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-250-05093-9

Page Count: 304

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014

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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

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THE VEGETARIAN

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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