Richly gripping, nonoccult thriller about telepathic twins- -from the author of Bella Mafia (1991) and writer of the much- acclaimed British PBS series Prime Suspect. Ruda and Rebecca as children were subjects of experiments in telepathy by Dr. Josef Mengele at the Birkenau death camp, where he told them that the stacks of newborn babies they saw weren't dolls but actually loaves about to be baked in the ovens. Carrying deep psychic wounds, the girls were parted when the Russians liberated the camp. Ruda became a child whore in Berlin, dreaming of getting to America and having herself attended to medically. Rebecca went to an orphanage, later was adopted by an American couple, and raised in Philadelphia. A fat, tantrum-y child beset by color- flashes, she grew up to become a pencil-thin New York model and drowned all memory of Ruda. She married Baron Louis de Marechal, lived amid fabulous wealth in Europe, and had four children, but each birth was followed by a mental breakdown. Now, Louis has brought her to Berlin to the hypnotherapy clinic of Dr. Franks, Louis's last hope before committing ``Vebekka'' (she has changed her name). Meanwhile, Ruda has married a dwarf in order to get to America. But he's imprisoned for theft and she moves on to an over- the-hill lion-tamer, Luis Grimaldi, whom she marries and brings back into the circus ring with a pride of great cats. Luis teaches Ruda, and at last she becomes perhaps the world's greatest lion- tamer (and you can believe it: Ruda's many scenes hustling huge hissing cats through their paces keep you rigid). It seems, however, that unbeknownst to the sisters, when they live near each other, Vebekka suffers flashes that signal a breakdown.... A pinch of the paranormal assures massive paralysis of the neckbones as you claw through the pages and hiss for privacy.
Pub Date: June 18, 1993
ISBN: 0-688-09243-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
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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