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BEING ESTHER

Name: BEING ESTHER
Author: Miriam Karmel
ISBN: 978-1-57131-096-5

by Miriam Karmel ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2013

Karmel's debut novel is a quiet contemplation of a woman’s final days.

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Over the course of her last days, widowed Esther Lustig, 85 years old and determined to avoid being placed in Cedar Shores (aka Bingoville), reflects upon her life.

A photograph from the past sparks this tale. Snapped in 1944, two weeks before Esther’s date died in the war, the picture shows Esther with her best friends, who had spontaneously jumped on stage, mugging for the camera as an imaginative girl band, the Starrlites. Now Esther wants to find her friend Sonia. As Esther’s narrative toggles back and forth between her past and her present, she worries whether she has made any lasting impression upon the world. Born to parents raised in a Polish shtetl, Esther learned modesty and frugality, neither of which appealed to her haughty mother-in-law, Toots Lustig, who chided her rustic cooking skills. Her husband, Marty, ate like a horse but strayed from his marital vows. Esther recalls her attraction to Marty but also her frustration with his domineering manner. Orbiting around Esther are her family, particularly Ceely, who is mysteriously angry with Esther and eager to shuffle her into a nursing home; her friends, several of whom have died or sunk into dementia; and the outside world, filled with rude and well-meaning people, all of whom treat Esther as an insignificant old woman. An awkward phone call to Sonia’s husband, a showdown with a rude customer at the market, a barely expressed quarrel with Ceely—these scenes, like a collection of photographs, accrue and build toward Esther’s acceptance of her past, which leaves her ready to slip into the next world.

Karmel's debut novel is a quiet contemplation of a woman’s final days.

Pub Date: April 2, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-57131-096-5

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Milkweed

Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION

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ABSOLUTE POWER

by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 18, 1996

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The mother of all presidential cover-ups is the centerpiece gimmick in this far-fetched thriller from first-novelist Baldacci, a Washington-based attorney. In the dead of night, while burgling an exurban Virginia mansion, career criminal Luther Whitney is forced to conceal himself in a walk-in closet when Christine Sullivan, the lady of the house, arrives in the bedroom he's ransacking with none other than Alan Richmond, President of the US. Through the one-way mirror, Luther watches the drunken couple engage in a bout of rough sex that gets out of hand, ending only when two Secret Service men respond to the Chief Executive's cries of distress and gun down the letter-opener-wielding Christy. Gloria Russell, Richmond's vaultingly ambitious chief of staff, orders the scene rigged to look like a break-in and departs with the still befuddled President, leaving Christy's corpse to be discovered at another time. Luther makes tracks as well, though not before being spotted on the run by agents from the bodyguard detail. Aware that he's shortened his life expectancy, Luther retains trusted friend Jack Graham, a former public defender, but doesn't tell him the whole story. When Luther's slain before he can be arraigned for Christy's murder, Jack concludes he's the designated fall guy in a major scandal. Meanwhile, little Gloria (together with two Secret Service shooters) hopes to erase all tracks that might lead to the White House. But the late Luther seems to have outsmarted her in advance with recurrent demands for hush money. The body count rises as Gloria's attack dogs and Jack search for the evidence cunning Luther's left to incriminate not only a venal Alan Richmond but his homicidal deputies. The not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper climax provides an unsurprising answer to the question of whether a US president can get away with murder. For all its arresting premise, an overblown and tedious tale of capital sins. (Film rights to Castle Rock; Book-of-the-Month selection)

Pub Date: Jan. 18, 1996

ISBN: 0-446-51996-0

Page Count: 480

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
SIMPLY LIES
by David Baldacci

- BOOK REVIEW
LONG SHADOWS
by David Baldacci

- BOOK REVIEW
THE 6:20 MAN
by David Baldacci

- AWARDS
David Baldacci Named a PEN/Faulkner Literary Champ

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.