An intriguing premise undermined by heavy-handed plot manipulation and shallow people.
A newly appointed family court judge discovers that the male defendant in her first custody case is her secret lover—and that’s only the prologue to this mix of old-fashioned romance and trendy issues like adoption, surrogate parenthood, and obsessive-behavior disorder.
After setting up the major crisis facing Judge Kelly MacLeod, how she’ll avoid presiding over a case involving her lover without dishonoring her role as judge, Thayer (Between Husbands and Friends, 1999) backs up to show how Kelly got herself into this predicament. After Kelly’s father died in Vietnam, she was raised by her mother and her father’s parents, but during Kelly’s senior year in college, her mother, under the sway of her evil second husband, absconded with Kelly’s inheritance. Suddenly destitute, Kelly acted as a surrogate mother to pay her way through law school, holding her newborn daughter just long enough to fall in love with her (and notice a small but crucial-to-the-plot birthmark).Years later, Kelly has become a highly respected lawyer when her mother reenters her life and renews their relationship before dying. On subsequent weekly visits to the cemetery, Kelly encounters an attractive middle-aged man visiting his recently deceased mother’s grave. Although they don’t exchange names at first, we know he is Randall Madison, a doctor whose soon–to-be ex-wife Anne is a rising liberal politician Kelly happens to support. Randall and Anne’s adopted daughter was born of an anonymous surrogate mother (guess who) with Randall’s sperm. Kelly, despite a disposable fiancé, and Randall fall in love while Randall and Anne fight over their daughter. The fact that Anne is an obsessive-compulsive neurotic and a wildly overprotective, occasionally violent mother while Randall is a sweetheart of a dad, his marital infidelity explained as the result of Anne’s disgust for sex, weakens Thayer’s attempts at evenhandedness late in the story—when love and humane justice prevail.
An intriguing premise undermined by heavy-handed plot manipulation and shallow people.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-27734-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
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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