Forty-two short-shorts, collected from two volumes originally published in France, chronicle a childhood and adolescence in Des Moines, Iowa. Together, the stories work like a snapshot album, with the life that's put on display full of odd Spoon River Anthology-like portraits but little real conflict. ``The images blend, overlap,'' Taylor writes in the penultimate piece, ``The View from the Upper Window.'' Otherwise, he describes in his own voice the loss of relatives and friends he grew up with in the 50's and 60's. In these evocative vignettes, instances are rendered vividly but never developed. Flipping through the snapshots is like glimpsing a life through anecdotes: ``Childhood Playmates'' (``My first death was Bud, Nancy's father''); ``Goodwin'' (``a mental genius and physical moron''); ``Nana'' (a woman whose ``friends began dying, one after another''); ``Tower Park'' (sketch of a place off-limits to a child, and thus all the more alluring and mythological); ``Andy Bill'' (a suicide); and the elegiac ``Words of Farewell'' (``friends who came into my life only to say good-bye and leave''). Other pieces, set in the present, allow characters to look back from a different perspective: in ``A Conversation,'' for instance, Taylor and his siblings talk about Des Moines, where their father still lives, and one sibling finally asks Taylor the crucial question—``Would you like to be buried there?'' Most of the stories come back to the theme of mortality: at their best, they're quirky and original, as in ``Breakfast with Casey Stengel.'' But finally, whether flat or inventive, they're all like ``The Fond Memory,'' prose poems that enshrine small moments from the author's past in piecemeal fashion. The entire collection, though undramatic, is a sort of Ray Bradbury Dandelion Wine remembrance of the Midwest as a golden place, a green world that lives on only in memory.
Pub Date: April 30, 1992
ISBN: 0-934257-69-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
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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