A modern comedy of manners that at times tries too hard to entertain.
Second-novelist Coll (karlmarx.com, 2000) energetically chronicles a soccer mom’s bumpy ride to tranquility as she deals with issues of finance, family, and self-esteem.
Our frazzled narrator, Jane Kramer, wife of Leon Kramer of Kramer’s Discount Furniture Store, is one of those women who are smart but fear they’re failing life: Jane is friendless, dislikes her job, money is tight, and her marriage is souring. She works at the family store with Leon and his old uncle Seymour because they can’t afford to pay outsiders—the merchandise is cheap and dated, someone is stealing from the till, and local preservationists are suing them for pulling down an allegedly historic barn when they rebuilt the store. Teenaged son Justin is into Goth music, dresses entirely in black, and has been suspended from school. Jane also suspects that Leon may be having an affair with voluptuous Delia, the furniture saleswoman advising them on how to improve business. Jane has taken to spending her lunch hour in the nearby graveyard on the Rockville Pike—a notorious Washington, DC, strip-mall highway—where F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald are buried. The graves could help business if, Delia suggests, they sell patio furniture with Fitzgerald associations. While Jane rereads the Fitzgerald novels to get ideas, she also becomes involved, through another soccer woman, in Memories Inc., a scrapbook merchandising system run, like Tupperware, out of homes. When Justin heads to New York without telling her, and Leon goes on a so-called business trip with Delia, Jane, in a panic, heads after them and has adventures of her own, including counseling a famous Washington trial lawyer and narrowly missing an encounter with thieves at the Plaza. By the close, though, a serendipitous series of events resolve misunderstandings and improve family fortunes, plus formerly hapless Jane no longer feels unloved and friendless.
A modern comedy of manners that at times tries too hard to entertain.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-4477-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
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
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose...
Sparks (The Longest Ride, 2013, etc.) serves up another heaping helping of sentimental Southern bodice-rippage.
Gone are the blondes of yore, but otherwise the Sparks-ian formula is the same: a decent fellow from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches falls in love with a decent girl from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches—and is still suffering the consequences. The guy is innately intelligent but too quick to throw a punch, the girl beautiful and scary smart. If you hold a fatalistic worldview, then you’ll know that a love between them can end only in tears. If you hold a Sparks-ian one, then true love will prevail, though not without a fight. Voilà: plug in the character names, and off the story goes. In this case, Colin Hancock is the misunderstood lad who’s decided to reform his hard-knuckle ways but just can’t keep himself from connecting fist to face from time to time. Maria Sanchez is the dedicated lawyer in harm’s way—and not just because her boss is a masher. Simple enough. All Colin has to do is punch the partner’s lights out: “The sexual harassment was bad enough, but Ken was a bully as well, and Colin knew from his own experience that people like that didn’t stop abusing their power unless someone made them. Or put the fear of God into them.” No? No, because bound up in Maria’s story, wrinkled with the doings of an equally comely sister, there’s a stalker and a closet full of skeletons. Add Colin’s back story, and there’s a perfect couple in need of constant therapy, as well as a menacing cop. Get Colin and Maria to smooching, and the plot thickens as the storylines entangle. Forget about love—can they survive the evil that awaits them out in the kudzu-choked woods?
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose corn syrup, stickily sweet but irresistible.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2061-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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