An entertaining appreciation of one woman's journey, sometimes ribald and funny, sometimes ironic and self-deprecating.
Marina Lucero reads the Dalai Lama, ponders Gandhi and yearns for inner peace. What she has is a challenging and needy family and a demanding and clueless set of friends.
Thirty-something Marina, a San Fernando Valley schoolteacher, had a mother who joined a Carmelite cloister when Marina was a child and a father who drank. Marina remains a bit resentful about her childhood, at least when her extended Hispanic family allows her time to think about it. There's older sister Della and her aimless dyslexic son Kiko. There's younger sister Xochi and her hapless sometime boyfriend Reggie. Then there is Rudy, Marina's former boyfriend, who thinks a failed relationship should provide fringe benefits. Marina does love Rudy's daughter, Letty, whom Marina mothered into adulthood. Letty's new baby, little Rudy, is hospitalized and mortally ill. Marina must rush to the aid of Letty and her husband, Miguel, a recovering drug addict, because that's what Marina does. She is a motherly caretaker, a woman constantly dancing between fatigue and self-imposed obligation. The book finds Marina teaching summer school, coping with Kiko and Reggie, both living on her couches, and providing intermittent refuge for Carlotta, her sweet next-door neighbor who is a punching bag for her out-of-work husband. Little Rudy dies, Letty attempts suicide, Carlotta is knocked into a hospital bed by her husband and Rudy demands that Marina give a false legal deposition so that his friend, Nestor, a Santeria priest, a voodoo babalawo, can escape child support payments. While dealing with these "hungry spirits," Marina generates romantic sparks with Carlos Lozano, an attractive and intelligent art teacher, and Arturo Ortiz, a nervous and engaging young doctor finishing his residency. López (Homicide Survivors Picnic and Other Stories, 2009, etc.) imagines believable characters and observes their world with literary insight.
An entertaining appreciation of one woman's journey, sometimes ribald and funny, sometimes ironic and self-deprecating.Pub Date: May 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-446-54963-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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