A defiantly abrasive tale by Scots author Warner (These Demented Lands, 1998, etc.) chronicles the misadventures of a sextet of teenaged Catholic schoolgirls seeking excitement and dissipation. The Sopranos, we—re told, was a commercial hit in England, and it’s easy to see why: the Belles of St. Trinian’s were obedient angels compared with the foulmouthed malcontents from our Lady of Perpetual Succor, where 27 girls got pregnant in one year; distracted Father Ardlui (a lapsed novelist) avoids unpleasant realities by distractedly imagining miracles; and much-despised Sister Pagan (“the Pagan”) and Condron (“Sister Condom”) strive womanfully to keep their disrespectful charges pure and holy. A group of the latter bond uproariously when the choir in which they sing travels to “the big, big city” for a musical competition. Warner nicely characterizes the girls in boisterous accounts of R-rated shopping trips, furtive boozing (they imbibe “alcoholic lemonade”), and heated pursuit—primarily at a disco called the Mantrap—of available men, whose shortcomings they nevertheless assess in high obscene style (“ . . . AIDS is the least of your worries wi those two dicks, more like Mad Cows Disease”). The novel’s tendency toward monotony is relieved by its roving fragmented structure (e.g., a long drunken conversation between Kay, who fears she’s pregnant, and Fionnula, who’s discovering she’s gay, both quickens the story’s pace and broadens its scope) and by several flashbacks that vividly personalize such otherwise blurry characters as (Ra)Chell, stunted by a legacy of incest, Kylah (singer with the rock band Lemonfinger), and Orla, whose grimly funny failed attempt at sex seems to embody the frustrations they’re all kicking back at. A little of this goes a long way, but Warner ends things smashingly with a seriocomic “all-nighter” featuring fireworks in toilets, “snogging” and “shagging” enough for all, followed by a happily unrepentant journey home.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-374-26670-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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