Muted, poignant drama with an immensely appealing depth, plain grace—and echoes of Inclán’s Her Daughter’s Eyes (2000).
A fault line opens—and a troubled family is torn apart.
Peri MacKenzie must care for her severely handicapped child without much help after her selfish husband decamps, but she does so with heart and humor . . .until the day she disappears. Then her precociously maternal daughter Carly takes over, carefully feeding five-year-old Brooke through a tube, cleaning and diapering her paralyzed body, and cheering her up with TV cartoons. Faithfully following Peri’s routine, right down to greeting her sister every morning with the wry “Hello, Exceptional Individual,” Carly wonders when her mother will come back—never doubting her return. But she doesn’t. Not wanting to cause trouble for her beleaguered family, resigned to receiving no help from her mostly oblivious 15-year-old brother, Carly gets by, hoping Brooke won’t spike a fever, as she frequently does. When the thermometer reveals a temperature that Tylenol won’t bring down, she calls on neighbor Rosie Candelero, a nurse, for help, and at last the social workers arrive. The little girl is found to have bedsores and other ailments, though it’s clear that Carly did her best. Eventually, Peri’s ex-husband Graham shows up—not that he’s immediately willing to admit any responsibility for driving his unwanted former family into near poverty. Someone else is going to have to be a hero. He couldn’t do it when Brooke was born and he can’t do it now. Then Peri’s father Carl returns, more or less out of the blue. A well-off, retired real-estate agent, Carl abandoned Peri and her mother Janice long ago, and now regrets it. He sees the situation as his chance to make amends and redeem himself, though Janice has been dead for several years and Peri is now in a mental institution (that’s where she’s gone) after a suicide attempt. Yet slowly—ever so slowly—the family begins to heal.
Muted, poignant drama with an immensely appealing depth, plain grace—and echoes of Inclán’s Her Daughter’s Eyes (2000).Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-451-20787-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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
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
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