This portrayal of a diamond in the rough uses brutal reality to create deeply human empathy.
In this debut thriller, a woman navigates a harsh world of sex, drugs, and crime.
Recovery from addiction can be a messy, complicated process, but that doesn’t begin to describe Domenica Delgado’s experience. After getting sick and tired of the vicious cycle of taking meth to get through her stints of prostitution and blowing her earnings on more of the drug, Domenica is finally coming up on six months sober. Unfortunately, someone with her history doesn’t have many options, especially bouncing between towns like American Falls, Idaho, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. She’s moved on from sex work (mostly) and addiction, but when she finds herself in the Alpine Gentlemen’s Club and she’s offered the chance to dig far deeper into a life of crime than she’d ever considered, she has to question what staying “clean” really means to her. It turns out that crime does pay, but when Domenica finds out how deep that rabbit hole goes, it may be too late to get out. Gaudio’s prose is not for the faint of heart, as the story is textured with the visceral, physical sensations of injury, unpleasant sex, and hard drug use as well as nearly every bodily excretion at one time or another (“I kick the handle, flushing this disaster some overweight woman probably left just to make room for a Big Mac. Disgusted, I put the toilet seat down, sit on the lid, and…suture my wounds”). But those coarse, sometimes-foul descriptions define Domenica’s world, and there’s a powerful sense of truth behind them. Readers are forced to confront the fact that this sometimes-sickening view of everyday spaces and objects is no less genuine than the more sanitized versions they might be used to. But even more than the graphic details and language, Domenica herself shines. At first the portrait of an unlikable protagonist—rude, vulgar, acerbic, criminal—the novel ultimately presents a complex character study of a survivor, someone who takes seemingly desperate acts and situations in stride because she doesn’t second guess the things she does by necessity. This violent world is as quotidian to her as a desk job would be to others. Learning how she got to be the person she is now is an illuminating journey, buoyed by her acid tongue and the tale’s fast-moving action.
This portrayal of a diamond in the rough uses brutal reality to create deeply human empathy.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-978092-59-4
Page Count: 322
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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