Sentimentality and a lack of original material prevent this novel from coming to life.
A pair of best friends yearns for love and a larger life.
Two young women: one blonde, one brunette; one conventional, one rebellious. Both Jewish; both employed in the Catskills for the summer tourist season. Both 19. Rosenthal’s (Take the D Train, 2012) new novel is set in 1940 and concerns a pair of Bronx-raised best friends. Frima spends the summer working at her mother’s resort; Bess works at another hotel not far away. Frima falls in love with Bess’ handsome brother, Jack, also employed by her mother that summer. Bess strays a bit afield: She catches the eye of Vinny, an Italian labor organizer. Her brother disapproves, but by the end of the summer, Bess has made some radical plans—to move away from home and, even more shocking, move in with Vinny. In alternating chapters, the novel tells the story from both girls’ points of view. That structure doesn’t quite work: It feels a little too on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other, especially since the characters are set up to be opposites. Worse is the air of sentimentality that pervades the book, overwhelming brief attempts at humor. Rosenthal’s prose is adequate and her subject matter not uninteresting, but the story feels utterly conventional. This terrain is already well-traversed. Her characters never come fully to life as themselves—only as two-dimensional foils for each other. The dialogue doesn’t convince; nor do the characters’ various motivations. We’re told that Bess, for example, longs to leave home because her parents make her miserable. But we’re never shown why or how they do so. Unconvincing in these smaller details, the novel remains unconvincing as a whole.
Sentimentality and a lack of original material prevent this novel from coming to life.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-439-4
Page Count: 300
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Engaging and intelligent fiction that celebrates one of Christianity’s great women.
George (Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles, 1992, etc.) again brings a historical figure to life, this time in a low-key but persuasively feminist take on the early disciple who found Christ’s empty tomb.
Though actual documentation of the life of Mary, the woman from Magdala on the Sea of Galilee, is scanty, George has done enough homework to make her role in early Christianity credible. Her Mary is not only the woman of the Gospels but also a preacher, healer, and confidante of Jesus, with whom she shares her troubling prophetic dreams. From her early childhood, when the story begins, Mary is bright and thoughtful but subject to strange dreams. Intimations of her future begin when, at seven, she goes with her family to Jerusalem to celebrate the Feast of Weeks. She picks up a carved ivory figure from the ground where the family is camping and hides it among her possessions. On this same expedition, she also meets and is impressed by the young Jesus and his mother Mary, also attending the festival. Mary Magdalene grows up, still haunted by dreams, but as she nears marriageable age, she is increasingly troubled by voices, skin lesions, and odd movements in her room. Being wed to Joel doesn’t help, and, frightened that the hidden idol is responsible, she confesses her fears to him. When none of the prescribed cures work, the young woman, despairing, heads to the desert, and there, listening to John the Baptist, meets Jesus. He exorcises the demons and the story goes on to tell how she joins Jesus (after being expelled by her family) and begins healing and preaching with the disciples. In relating the events leading to the Crucifixion, and the years afterward, George suggests that Mary loved Jesus not only as the Messiah but also as a man.
Engaging and intelligent fiction that celebrates one of Christianity’s great women.Pub Date: June 10, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03096-1
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
Deft, light, observant, and very funny indeed.
English scriptwriter and story-maker Bennett (The Clothes They Stood Up In, 2001; The Madness of George III) offers three stories about the foibles of being human.
At novella length (almost 100 pages), “The Laying On of Hands” opens with the unlikely prospect for humor of a memorial service in a London church. It’s being held for the handsome Clive Dunlop, dead at 34, by profession a masseur to the rich and famous (and the not so rich and famous). Cause of death? All suppose it to have been AIDS, a fact that for most of those gathered to mourn and remember Clive is a cause for secret and acute anxiety, since the affable Clive’s “professional” net was cast very, very wide. Imagine the relief of all assembled when they discover—during reminiscences about Clive that are invited by the liberal-minded clergyman who’s officiating—that the death wasn’t from that at all, but from an insect bite. People’s relief at such good news can be imagined—and Bennett imagines it with drollery and panache. “Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet” is a slighter—and shorter—affair, about the unconventional but salutary relationship that emerges between a woman and her foot doctor. “Father! Father! Burning Bright,” however, brings Bennett to top form again. While his own father was a plumber and man of the earth, Midgely went to university and became a teacher—and always suffered great unease and resentment, feeling he could never live up to whatever son’s duty was expected of him (a syndrome that hasn’t helped his marriage, by the way). Now that Father has had a sudden stroke and is catatonic, though, the least Midgely can do, what he should do, is be there with his father through the end. So he waits dutifully, for days, at the hospital—only once again, hilariously, to be outfoxed by his fate.
Deft, light, observant, and very funny indeed.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-29051-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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