A taut, disturbing family tale.
A dark novella focuses on the primal fears that befall parents—and anyone else who has endured the uncertainty of sleepless nights.
Parents often talk of the long evenings that come with caring for a newborn, but Richard and Lissa Platte face another level of struggle. Their 14-month-old child, Asher, has night terrors, and they’ve barely slept in the last six months. For Richard, every evening turns into “an ocean without shores.” He sadly wonders about the “terrible dreams” that plague his son. As the Plattes’ grip on reality slips away—Asher fussing and biting at day care, Lissa faltering on the careful preparation and style that propelled her to manage her own salon, and Richard losing time and awareness, forgetting the simplest of tasks or obligations—they begin to question whether something more sinister is going on. The flickering lights and sounds of their baby monitor seem to taunt them, and they each know that a breaking point—and a reckoning—will come. Their home, their lives, their jobs, their family have all become haunted, and when they find out what’s to blame, there’s no telling if they’ll ever recover. Ingwalson’s (Owl & Raccoon: Locked, 2016, etc.) narrative is effective and suspenseful, and while the conclusion at first appears to be a standard, urban legend-style twist, the ending is more complex and satisfying than that. At times, the prose needs some editing, as convoluted sentences get in the way of the mood: “She picks her phone up from a bedside table she found antiquing and sanded down and replaced the handles with little jewels and she did all these things herself.” But there are certainly instances when the minimalist writing style really impacts the reader, cutting to the core of the story: “There comes a moment when adults see past the flesh, past the noise and know themselves, and Richard thinks, Oh please, please don’t let this be that moment. This can’t be me.” While some readers may feel that the short length leads to a lack of details about the characters and their surroundings, others should enjoy the tight pacing and claustrophobic dynamic.
A taut, disturbing family tale.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5423-1125-0
Page Count: 124
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2017
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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