A lyrical description of a family’s search for their daughter and for their humanity.
Debut author Zilelian’s story follows a family of Armenian immigrants struggling to adapt to the American way of life while also contending with traditional coming-of-age conflicts.
While navigating issues of immigration and cultural assimilation, the family struggles with its own inner dysfunction: two parents embroiled in an unhealthy relationship, a missing daughter, and another daughter desperately grappling with the disappearance of her sister. As more characters become involved in the drama of finding Araxi, the family is forced to begin communicating. Though painful, this communication breaks open new opportunities for growth. Told in third person, the novel shifts to a new character in each chapter, allowing for the slowing of time and a careful view of how each character’s life is affected by the developing plot. Concrete details—ragged robes, chipped coffee mugs, leaky toilets, and worn, old music boxes—bring the domestic landscape to life, offering more than just a generic suburban family for the reader to hear, see, and sometimes smell. Voices are unique, from the annoyed, depression-dulled voice of the mother to the feeble, yet intelligent, voice of Sophie, the younger daughter. Sophie’s fascination with Araxi and her sister’s companion, Cecile, comes through in her thoughts: “She pictured them walking alongside each other, Araxi with her long dark hair and brown eyes, hands shoved in her pockets, and Cecile with her shoulders thrown back, and her waist length blond hair tied in a high ponytail.” The story shifts back and forth from the narrative of the family, aching for information about Araxi, to the journey of Araxi and Cecile, both of whom have run away and must face obstacles on the road, at motels, and with one another.
A lyrical description of a family’s search for their daughter and for their humanity.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0990573227
Page Count: 200
Publisher: BH Publications Pte Ltd.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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