Short and sweet; a mosaic of people, places and culture well worth knowing.
Costanzo (Restoration, 2014, etc.) presents his readers with a lush, literary portrait of family and culture across America after the second world war.
Tommy Caruso hasn’t seen his mascalzone (scoundrel) of a father for years, but he has his own life to live. His mother may have sent him to America from Naples to track down the deadbeat, but Tommy is more concerned with keeping track of his girlfriends. What’s more, the place mentioned in his last disappointing Christmas card—Livingstone, Colorado—doesn’t even seem to exist. The introduction is stunted by Tommy’s lack of investment in the search, but once he starts across the country, spurred on by his mother’s unquenchable temper, the story picks up speed. Tommy meets an excellent cast of secondary characters, uncovers layer upon layer of his father’s double life, and he soon realizes that the real story goes much deeper into the realms of crime, deception and American history than he could have imagined. But while Tommy’s discovery of his father’s life and the various branches of the Caruso family are fascinating, the novel’s greatest strength is in its breadth rather than its depth. From Laurie, a young woman who wants nothing more than to escape the dullness of her family, to Dolores, a Navajo girl hoping to use her college education to help her people, Tommy rarely witnesses a piece of American culture without also finding its opposite. And while he stumbles through his own life, he remains open to the stories around him. Even when he stays in one place for a while, he never stands still, becoming a barber and a chef in turn, meeting men out of history and forging memories of home in to a brilliant future. Tommy abruptly disappears from these jobs to continue his search, lending the novel a disjointed atmosphere at times, but overall, the story flows naturally, knitting together stories of both the beauty of the American dream and the failings of American reality.
Short and sweet; a mosaic of people, places and culture well worth knowing.Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-1483411989
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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