A novel of leaden purpose rather than spirit.
Editor (The Barbie Chronicles, 1999) and second-novelist (The Four Temperaments, 2002) McDonough follows a tidy, deeply predictable story about the death of a Brooklyn couple’s young daughter.
The freak car accident that killed seven-year-old Dahlia has left a deep fissure between Rick Wechsler, a successful Brooklyn podiatrist who was driving the car at the time of the accident, and wife Naomi, a teacher who now volunteers at the hospital where Dahlia was taken DOA. “There were so many ways in which she had failed Rick these days,” Naomi admits, and indeed, he spends a good deal of time trolling porn sites before succumbing to the needy advances of his single-mom office manager, Lillian. While at work at the hospital, however, Naomi has been spending some quality time with the chief of pediatrics, Michael McBride, a disheveled lapsed Catholic with a wife and two daughters of his own; when Rick impulsively confesses his dalliance, Naomi throws him out and finds field-leveling comfort with Michael. McDonough advances her carefully calibrated plot in alternating viewpoints, including that of Naomi’s mother Estelle, a dotty old lady of the Barbara Stanwyck era who tries to escape from her Riverdale nursing home because she can’t comprehend Dahlia’s death. The prose is unmemorable and bland. In McDonough’s hands, the reader is always safe and reassured, because there is no chance of deviation from her set-in-stone plot and no way the characters can evolve organically. They are as familiar as generic household products, from strong, selfless, sexless Naomi and randy Rick, entitled but not too smart, to the mismatched but well-intentioned Michael, who runs to church to confess, and the fetching, vaguely ethnic Lillian with her cheap taste in clothes and furniture. Even the accidents and coincidences are strenuously plotted, and a memory of poor Dahlia seems an afterthought.
A novel of leaden purpose rather than spirit.Pub Date: April 19, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-50362-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of...
Hoover’s (November 9, 2015, etc.) latest tackles the difficult subject of domestic violence with romantic tenderness and emotional heft.
At first glance, the couple is edgy but cute: Lily Bloom runs a flower shop for people who hate flowers; Ryle Kincaid is a surgeon who says he never wants to get married or have kids. They meet on a rooftop in Boston on the night Ryle loses a patient and Lily attends her abusive father’s funeral. The provocative opening takes a dark turn when Lily receives a warning about Ryle’s intentions from his sister, who becomes Lily’s employee and close friend. Lily swears she’ll never end up in another abusive home, but when Ryle starts to show all the same warning signs that her mother ignored, Lily learns just how hard it is to say goodbye. When Ryle is not in the throes of a jealous rage, his redeeming qualities return, and Lily can justify his behavior: “I think we needed what happened on the stairwell to happen so that I would know his past and we’d be able to work on it together,” she tells herself. Lily marries Ryle hoping the good will outweigh the bad, and the mother-daughter dynamics evolve beautifully as Lily reflects on her childhood with fresh eyes. Diary entries fancifully addressed to TV host Ellen DeGeneres serve as flashbacks to Lily’s teenage years, when she met her first love, Atlas Corrigan, a homeless boy she found squatting in a neighbor’s house. When Atlas turns up in Boston, now a successful chef, he begs Lily to leave Ryle. Despite the better option right in front of her, an unexpected complication forces Lily to cut ties with Atlas, confront Ryle, and try to end the cycle of abuse before it’s too late. The relationships are portrayed with compassion and honesty, and the author’s note at the end that explains Hoover’s personal connection to the subject matter is a must-read.
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of the survivors.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1036-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Roberts does it again with this fast-paced romantic mystery that's both steamy and thrilling, despite its somewhat obvious...
Beautiful Italian babe with a passion for fire and doomed hunks joins the arson squad and discovers that someone has held a torch for her since she was a child.
When Reena Hale is 11 years old, she watches her family's Baltimore pizzeria go up in flames. Thanks to a local arson detective, John Minger, and the girl's keen memory, police determine that a neighborhood crook whose young son had recently attacked Reena was out for revenge, and soon cops publicly haul the dirt bag off to jail. The large and loving Hale family bands together and rebuilds; Reena grows up curious about the origins of fire. She attends college and, after her boyfriend dies in an accident, joins the police force and learns the inner workings of the fire department. Eventually, she teams with Minger to solve the city's suspicious fires. Meanwhile, over the years, a shady character has been hiding in the shadows, waiting for the right moment to violently sabotage Reena's relationships (usually with the help of explosives). Somehow Reena doesn't put together that all of her boyfriends have been in the path of catastrophic (occasionally deadly) events, so her stalker hits the phone lines to clue her in with dirty messages that become more and more intimate. When Reena launches a torrid love affair with her new neighbor, whose truck soon explodes, she begins to get it. Fearing for her family's safety, Reena reopens past cases and learns that her troubles started when she was a child. The tale builds to a breathless climax as she (literally) races to beat out the flames of one fire before determining where the next one will be set.
Roberts does it again with this fast-paced romantic mystery that's both steamy and thrilling, despite its somewhat obvious nature.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-15306-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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