An entertaining oater that’s also a subtle study in understated manliness.
Horse racing is a nail-biting proposition—especially in the bandit-infested Old California of this tense Western.
Fed up with training other people’s horses in Kentucky, Cole Copeland has taken to the local California racing circuit with his trusty steed. It’s a sport of artfully manipulated appearances as well as hurtling horseflesh; often posing as an Arkansas rube, Cole pits his well-trained equine ringer against the actual rubes’ favorite nags in informal races and cleans up on the resulting bets. He makes a living, garnering bags full of gold coins that, in the 1870s, attract plenty of desperadoes whom he fends off with his trusty Winchester and two pistols, one for show and another hidden to shoot. A mysterious man named Sandy, who may or may not be a bandit chieftain—but so might anyone—steers him towards the big race-match gathering at Tehachapi that draws the best horses and the richest swells in the California racing scene and where an unknown quantity like Cole might clean up. With his excitable 14-year-old groom Jeremy, Cole plunges into the byzantine swirl of Tehachapi and takes readers along into this arcane and fascinating world. The race itself is almost secondary to the negotiations leading up to it, in which Cole craftily susses out the competition and maneuvers them into the perfect race, with high stakes and a field so good that the oddsmakers don’t realize he can win. Writing with a clipped, precise prose, professional horse-trainer Porter fits plenty of suspenseful showdowns and hair-raising gunfights into this galloping yarn, but balances it with absorbing lore on his craft. Protagonist Cole makes an appealing man in the saddle—he’s cool, wary, always at work on a back-up plan to his back-up plan and a hard-nosed businessman who sees a horse as a moneymaking investment—but he’s also sublimely attuned to the equine soul.
An entertaining oater that’s also a subtle study in understated manliness.Pub Date: April 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-1453705933
Page Count: 236
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2011
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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