Shorter and less digressive than earlier installments, with most of the complications wrapped up in an even more...
Momentous crises loom for several denizens of 44 Scotland St. and environs—and this time, a few of them find momentous resolutions.
As 7-year-old Bertie Pollock submits meekly to more rounds of abuse by his horrid classmate, Olive, his statistician father, Stuart, is angling for a big promotion that pits him against two strident but incompetent women, and his formidable mother, Irene, is plotting to leave Edinburgh to begin a Ph.D. program in Aberdeen with her sometime lover, psychiatrist-turned-professor Hugo Fairbairn. Bruce Anderson, God’s gift to women, has a bizarre proposal to offer his old girlfriend Pat Macgregor, who, despite her acute awareness of his hopeless narcissism, can’t help being smitten with him all over again. Pat’s boss, gallery owner Matthew, and his wife, Elspeth, fret over replacing their triplet sons’ unsuitable Danish au pairs, whom they fired for cause (The Bertie Project, 2017)—and Matthew’s attempt to avoid an embarrassing meeting with his old teacher Mrs. Patterson Cowie lands him in trouble with the police. Anthropologist Domenica MacDonald wonders whether she really loves her bridegroom, painter Angus Lordie, or whether she’s just going through the motions for the sake of quiet and convenience. The author’s special gift in this long-running franchise is to take each of these moral dilemmas equally seriously, so it’s anyone’s guess which of them will turn out to be consequential and which merely agreeably vexing.
Shorter and less digressive than earlier installments, with most of the complications wrapped up in an even more suspiciously tidy way than usual. But readers who’ve come to know and love these characters can only rejoice in their rescue from trivial problems that can suddenly balloon to monstrous size.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-43655-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
With her second novel, Ng further proves she’s a sensitive, insightful writer with a striking ability to illuminate life in...
This incandescent portrait of suburbia and family, creativity, and consumerism burns bright.
It’s not for nothing that Ng (Everything I Never Told You, 2014) begins her second novel, about the events leading to the burning of the home of an outwardly perfect-seeming family in Shaker Heights, Ohio, circa 1997, with two epigraphs about the planned community itself—attesting to its ability to provide its residents with “protection forever against…unwelcome change” and “a rather happy life” in Utopia. But unwelcome change is precisely what disrupts the Richardson family’s rather happy life, when Mia, a charismatic, somewhat mysterious artist, and her smart, shy 15-year-old daughter, Pearl, move to town and become tenants in a rental house Mrs. Richardson inherited from her parents. Mia and Pearl live a markedly different life from the Richardsons, an affluent couple and their four high school–age children—making art instead of money (apart from what little they need to get by); rooted in each other rather than a particular place (packing up what fits in their battered VW and moving on when “the bug” hits); and assembling a hodgepodge home from creatively repurposed, scavenged castoffs and love rather than gathering around them the symbols of a successful life in the American suburbs (a big house, a large family, gleaming appliances, chic clothes, many cars). What really sets Mia and Pearl apart and sets in motion the events leading to the “little fires everywhere” that will consume the Richardsons’ secure, stable world, however, is the way they hew to their own rules. In a place like Shaker Heights, a town built on plans and rules, and for a family like the Richardsons, who have structured their lives according to them, disdain for conformity acts as an accelerant, setting fire to the dormant sparks within them. The ultimate effect is cataclysmic. As in Everything I Never Told You, Ng conjures a sense of place and displacement and shows a remarkable ability to see—and reveal—a story from different perspectives. The characters she creates here are wonderfully appealing, and watching their paths connect—like little trails of flame leading inexorably toward one another to create a big inferno—is mesmerizing, casting into new light ideas about creativity and consumerism, parenthood and privilege.
With her second novel, Ng further proves she’s a sensitive, insightful writer with a striking ability to illuminate life in America.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2429-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Pointedly inspirational.
Stein (How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets, 2005, etc.) uses a dog as narrator to clever effect in this tear-jerker about an aspiring race-car driver who suffers more woes than Job but never mistreats his dog.
Lab mix Enzo believes he is different from other dogs, that he has a human soul in a dog body. Enzo is frustrated that he can use only “gestures” to communicate with his beloved owner Denny. Denny works in a Seattle auto-repair shop to earn money to race. Enzo watches racing channels on TV, soaking up facts and lore. Dog and man are happy in their bachelor Eden. Enter Eve. She and Enzo are wary at first. Then she goes into labor while Denny’s away racing and she keeps Enzo beside her. Enzo adores the baby, Zoë, but he soon smells that something is off with Eve. By the time Zoë is a toddler, Eve has increasingly bad headaches but refuses to see a doctor until it’s too late. Now come the travails. During Eve’s painful, lingering death, her parents, who have never approved of Denny, loom increasingly large. When Eve dies, they sue for permanent custody of Zoë. Their case is weak until Denny is charged with rape: After a reunion of Eve’s family shortly before her death, Denny gave a ride home to Eve’s 15-year-old cousin, who attempted to seduce him; he rebuffed her but Enzo was the only witness. Eve’s evil parents are behind the trumped-up charges. Noble Denny keeps fighting for Zoë, living by his mantra, “That which you manifest is before you.” When he almost buckles, Enzo provides some rather unique assistance.
Pointedly inspirational.Pub Date: May 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-153793-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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