Padura capably works here in Perez-Reverte territory, where art and ideas meet mayhem. Smart and satisfying though too long...
Cuban mysterian Padura (The Man Who Loved Dogs, 2013, etc.) returns with another installment in his Mario Conde detective series, this one following a Rembrandt portrait over centuries and continents.
Conde, as Padura’s fans know, is a former cop–turned-investigator, suspicious of everyone and everything. It turns out that, to supplement his income as all Cubans on the island must, he’s developed a sideline in the book trade—and has done pretty well for himself as a scout for one Yoyi the Pigeon, an entrepreneurial young “engineer who had never touched a screw or entered any job sites.” It’s in that guise that Conde falls in with a painter, Daniel Kaminsky, who is on the track of a missing treasure: long ago, an ancestor had come into the possession of a small Rembrandt portrait that had traveled with the family across a bitterly anti-Semitic Europe for centuries until arriving in Cuba with a shipload of refugees aboard the ill-fated Saint Louis; that painting, writes Padura, had variously been “a secret, a family heirloom, and, in the end, a jewel on which the last Kaminskys to enjoy owning it would place their greatest hopes for salvation.” Why a Jew of modest means should have been carrying a work of art by the Master in the first place turns out to be the crux of a story that Padura spins off to incorporate numerous threads—in fact, four main strands of them in four separate books that run backward, biblically, from Daniel to Genesis, and that hop from place to place: Havana, Miami, Krakow, Amsterdam. There are real heretics behind the title of Padura’s book, but the term embraces all sorts of outsiders, from Yoyi, who represents something like the fall of socialist man, to young Cuban neo-rebels (“hearing two lesbian confessions on the same day…exceeded his capacity for understanding”) and the hidden marrano Jews of the New World.
Padura capably works here in Perez-Reverte territory, where art and ideas meet mayhem. Smart and satisfying though too long by 100 pages.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-71678-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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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