Tender, funny, and touching: a fitting close to an admirable career.
In her elegiac final novel, the late Adams picks up the story of Cynthia and Harry Baird where she left off in A Southern Exposure (1995).
It’s now August 1944, and Cynthia is home in Pinehill, the southern college town to which the couple relocated during the Depression. Harry, a naval officer, is stationed in London; daughter Abigail is about to start at Swarthmore. The opening scene, a party for Abigail and her Radcliffe-bound friend Melanctha Byrd, sets the stage with Adams's customary deftness. Cynthia is having an affair with war correspondent Derek McFall, who is “not in love with her, not at all.” Her maid Odessa, a stately black woman whose husband is also in the Navy, likes Cynthia but has little use for “her supposed best friend” Dolly Bigelow, a near-caricature of the bigoted southern belle who later proves to be not quite as dumb or prejudiced as she seems. Melanctha's father, alcoholic poet James Russell Lowell Byrd, and his much younger second wife, Deirdre, are among the other locals in attendance as readers absorb the town's ingrown, gossipy nature. Up north, meanwhile, Abigail falls in love with James Marcus, son of New York Jewish communists satirized with wicked accuracy as straitjacketed by their world's conventions just as tightly Cynthia's southern neighbors. Despite a plethora of love affairs and two deaths, almost everyone is essentially marking time, aware that America will be dramatically different “after the war.” The story closes two years later with a wedding. Most of the characters (depicted with Adams's trademark sensitivity) have made meaningful changes in their lives; even Cynthia and Harry's complex marriage seems to be healing after a rocky reunion. As in most of Adams's fiction, the quiet narrative concerns itself less with political issues (though white racism is a constant subtext) than with personal struggles, which coalesce to create an overall atmosphere of a slightly anxious yet always eager embrace of life's possibilities.
Tender, funny, and touching: a fitting close to an admirable career.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40683-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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