A real potboiler but a good one: interesting characters, exciting situations, a nice, taut narrative.
A sweeping historical from Britisher Read (The Templars, 2000, etc.), who brings us into WWI and the Russian Revolution as seen through the eyes of a liberated young lady of the early 20th century.
Alice Fry may seem as English as Devonshire cream, but she is actually half-French, and her father, the founder and president of the Progressive Press, is a couple of degrees short of being an outright Communist. Alice is both open-minded and uncommonly well-informed about the world—thanks, in part, to all the books on her father’s backlist—so it shouldn’t be too surprising that her first great love affair is with someone most of her friends consider entirely inappropriate: an aristocrat. Edward Cobb is the son of a baronet, a product of Eton and Oxford, an army officer, and a budding member of Parliament. Seduced by the precocious Alice, he’s smitten overnight and begs her to marry him. Although Alice disapproves of marriage as an institution, she accepts. But soon afterward Alice’s father becomes the center of controversy when one of his books (a treatise on sex) brings a trial for public obscenity. Worried for his political career, Edward decides that Alice is too much of a liability and breaks off the engagement. Pregnant with his child, Alice leaves the country for a position as governess in the household of a Russian count. There, the turmoil of WWI and the approaching Russian Revolution surround her—turmoil that she (as daughter of a socialist intellectual) is in a better position to understand than most. Meanwhile, Edward regrets his decision and sets off to search for her in a Europe convulsed by revolution and war. Alice, however (now the mother of Edward’s son), has fallen in love with the baron who hired her.
A real potboiler but a good one: interesting characters, exciting situations, a nice, taut narrative.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-30398-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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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