Walker’s debut displays a depth of characterization that almost transcends the shopworn premise.
The anxieties of four suburban mothers surface as they plan a benefit for underprivileged women.
Janie, who never misses a Pilates class and can drink any number of vanilla lattes with caloric impunity, is the envy of her three girlfriends—Love, Gayle and Marie—all residents of upscale Hunting Ridge, Conn. But she’s desperately staving off middle age with surgery, not to mention a clandestine, motel-room affair. Meanwhile, Love, married to an ER doctor, has just received an unsettling letter from her estranged father that threatens to re-open a traumatic episode that halted her halcyon years as a child genius. Gayle, heiress to New England old money, is increasingly intimidated by her lawyer husband, Troy, who resents his financial dependence on her. Marie gave up a lucrative New York legal career for motherhood and a less demanding private practice in family law. The four friends are co-hosting a gala to take place at Gayle’s estate, proceeds to go to a women’s clinic. Gayle’s carefully orchestrated, pharmaceutically assisted life veers off course when she realizes Troy is bullying their young son, Oliver. When her cook, sensitive artist Paul, intervenes, Troy fires Paul. Love is suffering from debilitating back pain, and her mother, aging Hollywood actress Yvonne, convinces Love that her pain is the outward manifestation of suppressed emotions that will only be released by a confrontation with her father. Marie, for her part, is battling a powerful attraction to her law clerk, Randy. She’s handling a divorce case that explodes when she uncovers the secret behind the accidental death of her client’s toddler. The suspense here is largely dependent on withholding information from the reader. The identity of Janie’s lover could be revealed much earlier, as could the exact nature of Love’s childhood trauma, without detracting from the best feature of this novel: the characters’ ability to spellbind even as they whine about unhelpful, demanding, clueless husbands or otherwise appear to wallow in victimhood.
Walker’s debut displays a depth of characterization that almost transcends the shopworn premise.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36771-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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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