An easily digestible, warmhearted tale of eye-opening friendships.
A young divorcée embarks on a journey of self-discovery during one eventful summer.
As Thayer (The Island House, 2016, etc.) opens her tale, 30-year-old Darcy Cotterill is blindsided when her ex-husband arrives in Nantucket for the summer. Not only has her ex, Boyz, brought his new wife and her 14-year-old daughter, Willow, to the island where Darcy lives year-round, they have rented the house immediately behind hers for the summer. As a woman who spends much time in her backyard garden, Darcy quickly learns more than she wanted to know about Boyz’s new family. It seems that Boyz and his wife spend precious little time supervising Willow, who has gotten involved with one of the island’s suspected drug dealers. Darcy takes matters into her own hands and befriends Willow, asserting some authority over the girl to protect her from harm. She introduces Willow to their other summer neighbors, who she hopes will be better influences. Mimi, an elderly woman who reminds Darcy of her own recently deceased grandmother, is renting the house to one side of Darcy’s, and Susan, the frazzled mother of three rambunctious boys, is renting another. Before long, this group becomes a committed foursome of friends. Under Darcy’s influence, Willow begins helping with storytime at the library instead of dabbling in drugs, babysits Susan’s frenetic kids, and acts as a companion to the elderly Mimi. As the story progresses, Darcy lands in a few confusing romantic situations of her own, and she's thankful to have these women, young and old, to help her navigate. Full of rich details about life on Nantucket, this breezy tale is at once nostalgic and hopeful. Although the prose is a bit bland, the story is filled with sweet moments of unlikely female connections.
An easily digestible, warmhearted tale of eye-opening friendships.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-96707-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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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