Tolkien knows his way around a courtroom, that’s for sure, but that doesn’t stop him from resorting to Perry Mason–like...
Standard-issue murder-mystery dramatics unfold in a world far, far away from Middle Earth.
Yes, he’s one of those Tolkiens. This being the debut novel from the 43-year-old London barrister—and grandson of the late, great J.R.R.—Simon is not exactly what you would expect, considering the family name, and that’s most likely a good thing. Undoubtedly, there’s another family member out there wondering why The Lord of the Rings had to end. In any case, Simon’s first book is not about elves or magic at all, but rather something closer to Jeffrey Archer territory. Sixteen-year-old Thomas Robinson is the bookish and retiring son of England’s rather imperious defense minister, Sir Peter Robinson. Lady Anne, Thomas’s mother and Peter’s wife, was murdered a year before the story opens by a couple of thugs plundering the ancestral manse. Only things aren’t quite as simple as that. Peter’s rather too-efficient personal assistant, Greta, had been hanging about the house quite before that, and Anne, being a sensible upper-class British wife, knew a gold digger when she saw one. Tensions had been running high, and Peter had as much as moved out by the time of the murder. To the horror of the already devastated Peter, Thomas accused Greta of the murder. All of this is laid out before the reader in a series of flashbacks that jump back to different points in the tumultuous previous two years and then snap forward to the future and the high-profile murder trial of Lady Greta Robinson. Thomas is obviously terrified, as the same men who killed Anne have already come back to the house once to kill him. There’s nothing exactly wrong with what transpires here: Final Witness is efficiently rendered stuff, but there’s little to shout about.
Tolkien knows his way around a courtroom, that’s for sure, but that doesn’t stop him from resorting to Perry Mason–like cliché if the mood strikes him.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50882-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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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