An entirely unromantic and unapologetic ode to doing what you want when you want—to hell with the consequences.
Debut about an ambitious party girl and her borderline hustler best friend who take Europe by storm.
The two party kids, DJ and Amy, are young Brits who—after a drunken New Year’s found them both dumped and disconsolate—decide to light out for the Continent, determined to live fast, not work, and grab as much as they can in the drinking/drugging/screwing department. They tell their story in tradeoffs, DJ giving his side and Amy coming in to refute half of what he’s just said. Though friends for years, they have a rocky relationship, illustrated by the fact that the story opens with DJ fellating Amy’s current boyfriend “under the table of some stinking club in not so gay Paris.” The two of them aren’t long for Paris in any case, with DJ upset with Amy for having actually gone and taken a job, while he believes himself to be sticking to their agreement by getting his money by theft and turning tricks. Soon, they’re in Madrid, rooming with a couple of drag cabaret performers, then not much later decamping for the Auvergne, where they’re saddled with Marilyn, a screechy young college boy who will finally follow them back to Paris, selling drugs and causing a rift between Amy and DJ. The tale is an epic of supreme selfishness, with DJ barely able to comprehend that there might be things he won’t be allowed to take, men who won’t want to sleep with him, situations where he won’t get his way. Amy appears moderately more mature, but it’s fleeting. There’s little chance to catch one’s breath between all the clubbing and random hook-ups, with the British author determined to keep his characters spiraling downward into a black hole of narcissistic self-obsession until they crack (or not—it’s not a very moral sort of story).
An entirely unromantic and unapologetic ode to doing what you want when you want—to hell with the consequences.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-7475-6593-7
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
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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