An elegant consideration of how death and distance tightens human connections—a big theme that Vida addresses with...
A widow vacationing in Turkey becomes slowly awakened to the tensions in the lives surrounding her and in the ones she left behind.
Like Vida’s previous book, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (2007), this novel concerns a woman eager to escape a host of emotional frustrations back home in the United States. But instead of Northern Lights’ chilly Lapland, this story is set on the sunny southwest coast of Turkey, where Yvonne has retreated after her husband’s death in a car accident; there, she intends to catch up with her daughter, a recovering addict, and her well-adjusted son. But the narrative deals with Yvonne in isolation, and again Vida shows she’s supremely talented at tracing the drifts of memory and emotion that course through a person. The small town where she’s rented a house is near where she and her late husband spent their honeymoon some three decades earlier, and it takes little to get her thinking about her past as a wife and mother. The rented house also affects her imagination. Evidence of the owner’s sex life is poorly hidden in the rooms, and when his estranged wife visits, Yvonne gets further clued into the emotional and sexual tug of war she’s unwittingly stepped into. Though it briefly seems that the novel might take a more sensual turn (the book appears to take its title from Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, Yvonne’s beach reading), the story soon becomes more complicated. The brief friendships Yvonne strikes up with shop owners, fellow tourists and a young boy on the beach all question how useful it is to try and shed our concerns by pursuing a change of scenery, and Vida’s clear, simple prose exposes how Yvonne’s feelings of loss emerge despite her best efforts. A plot turn following the boy’s disappearance intensifies the emotional pitch, leading to Yvonne’s subtle but powerful revelation about the role she’s played in others’ lives.
An elegant consideration of how death and distance tightens human connections—a big theme that Vida addresses with sure-footedness and charm.Pub Date: June 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-082839-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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