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GILGAMESH

Name: GILGAMESH
Author: Joan London
ISBN: 0-8021-1741-4

by Joan London ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2003

London’s story gradually works up a head of steam and by the end becomes quite engrossing—even if the...

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First novel, as well as a first US appearance, for Australian author London: the story of an Australian woman who travels halfway around the world in pursuit of the man she loves.

Edith Clark grew up in the outback of southwestern Australia, but her roots—and heart—were elsewhere. Her parents were English immigrants who sought a new start after WWI, but Edith’s father Frank knew nothing of farm life and failed badly at it. He died while Edith was still a girl, leaving her, her mother, and sister to fend for themselves. The genteel Ada, descended into chronic depression, while Edith’s sister Frances, swallowed up in a religious mania, became a preacher. Edith, more conventionally, fell in love with a bad man: Armenian archaeologist Aram Sinanien, a friend of Edith’s cousin Leopold, who visited the Clarks on his return from a dig in 1937. An ardent nationalist, Aram left Edith pregnant in Australia to return to his homeland (under Soviet control) to fight with the underground independence movement. Edith gave birth to his son, then set off, baby in tow, to find him in Armenia. A difficult trip in the best of times, this was almost a suicide mission after the outbreak of WWII. But Edith crossed the Soviet borders with surprising ease and quickly made contact with friends of Aram’s, who agreed to help her search for him. She was able, too, against all odds, to travel mostly unmolested with her infant son through the war zones. Perhaps she should have doubted her own luck a bit, or stopped to wonder whether she was being used as bait by the NKVD. But such considerations were lost on Edith, who (like all true lovers) never stopped to weigh the pros and cons of her quest.

London’s story gradually works up a head of steam and by the end becomes quite engrossing—even if the two-souls-caught-in-the-maelstrom-of-history theme comes across as a poor knockoff of Dr. Zhivago.

Pub Date: April 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-8021-1741-4

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GOLDEN AGE
by Joan London

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GOOD PARENTS
by Joan London

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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2004

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

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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:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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THE VEGETARIAN

by Han Kang ; translated by Deborah Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 2, 2016

An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.

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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.