A beautifully written story about loss and second chances.
After a traumatic car accident leaves her addled, a woman struggles to care for her aging mother in this novel.
Dee Ellison Chope, 64, lives with her 90-year-old mother, Bessie, whose mental faculties have deteriorated enough that she requires nearly constant supervision. Sixteen years earlier, Dee was in a horrible car accident that killed her husband, and a serious brain injury left her similarly in need of care. She moved back into her parents’ house, but just as she recovered enough to live on her own, her father died suddenly, leaving Bessie alone and saddled with debt. Dee had to find work to pay off a second mortgage on the home and stayed to assist her aging and increasingly helpless mother. Meanwhile, her younger brother, Georgie, always favored by Bessie and forever selfish, schemes to purloin the house for his own financial self-aggrandizement, even in advance of Bessie’s death. But Dee discovers that Georgie had borrowed a considerable sum of money from her father before he died, a loan she essentially repaid by covering the second mortgage. Georgie calls Adult Protective Services to have his mother committed to a home, forcing Dee to defend the quality of her custodianship. Separated from her grown-up children, widowed, and tasked with caring for a mother she had a difficult relationship with, Dee finds her life stalled until she gives romance another try. Arbor’s (Intentional, 2015) lucid prose poignantly captures Dee’s ambivalence about a family she loves but that often disappoints her: “Her brother murdered her favorite doll. He never touched or hurt any of her other dolls, so he wasn’t a serial killer. He just chose the prettiest, the one with her dress perfectly arranged on a messy shelf, the one she loved the most—the one her father gave her.” The depiction of Georgie flirts with hyperbole—he’s given almost no redeemable features. But Dee is bottomless in her complexity, a woman coping with her mother, mortality, and a bird in the house (“Dee still had most of her marbles, and however much she wanted to, she couldn’t blank out the image of the dead bird she’d discovered in the fireplace that morning. A bird in the house is bad luck. Someone’s gonna die”). She’s a protagonist worthy of the reader’s gripping interest.
A beautifully written story about loss and second chances.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9862206-3-0
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Spring Forward Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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