Witty but slight.
In this Christmas-themed novel from Valdes-Rodriquez (The Husband Habit, 2009, etc.), a newly single interior designer tests the tenets of The Rules on three potential mates.
Christy de la Cruz was shocked when her perfect husband, Zach, announced he was gay. Now divorced, Christy juggles her busy schedule as designer to Albuquerque’s rich and famous with the demands of her large, socio-economically disadvantaged but warm and outspoken Mexican-American clan. At a family pig roast in the barrio neighborhood where she grew up, Christy is challenged by her cousin Maggie to put Zach behind her—in addition to being gay, he’s an Anglo and an outsider. Maggie bets Christy that three dates each with three handsome homeboys who have made good will heal her broken heart. The caballeros in question, named after the Three Kings, are Balthazar, who bullied the once chubby Christy in grade school, Caspar, a wealthy music agent, and Melchior, a nationally known authority on chimpanzee behavior. To placate Maggie, and to alleviate her own guilt for not helping her relatives out financially, Christy takes the wager. Melchior is too wrapped up in his primates to appeal to her. She’s still resentful of Balthazar’s earlier bullying, and as a lowly high-school teacher, he’s not exactly prosperous. The most likely prospect is Caspar, who is in Christy’s income bracket and has the Beemer to prove it. She’s also powerfully attracted to him. Will she be able to resist his allure enough to feign indifference and to keep their three dates platonic, as dictated by The Rules? Will she come to realize that loyalty to her family sometimes demands generosity of more than spirit? Is there more to Balthazar than her suppositions about him, and less to Casper? The answers are predictable and clichéd. The chief pleasures, besides descriptions of outfits, food and local color, lie in the banter between Christy and the other characters—and in the contrast between her Rules-dictated demureness and her unvoiced opinions.
Witty but slight.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-60533-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
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
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