A tenderly moving debut novel about three generations of Cuban-American women who turn the brief life of a handicapped baby into a celebration of life and love. Veciana-Suarez, a columnist for the Miami Herald, sets her first fiction in the same Miami neighborhood she grew up in: a place of bodegas, Cuban restaurants, and neatly maintained duplexes like the one her characters share. The three protagonists here have not had an easy life: Cuca, the matriarch, is long-widowed; Adela, her daughter, was divorced while still raising her only child; and this child, Maribel, now adult and pregnant, has been abandoned by her drug-running husband. The three women have responded to trouble in different ways. Cuca, who endured numerous pregnancies before giving birth to Adela, is comforted by memories of her life in Cuba, by her talks with the dead, and by her practice of herbal medicine. Adela, a frivolous and pleasure-loving cosmetologist, has numerous lovers, including the husband of her best friend. Maribel, unlike her mother, is an immaculate housekeeper, a serious career woman, and, except for her passion for drug-dealing Eduardo, is ``a stranger to risk and adventure.'' When baby Victor Eduardo is born prematurely, however, all their lives are changed. Victor is born with trisomy 18—an extra chromosome—and Maribel is told he won't live long. In the brief months that follow, she at first fights to keep him alive, then eventually learns to accept what can't be changed as Victor begins to weaken. Adela also joins the fight, discovering some surprising inner resources along the way. And Cuca, keeping watch over the dying baby, is comforted by seeing all she had loved and lost ``waiting for Victor, ready for him.'' A three-hankie debut, luminously written, that is also a loving grace note to family and the human spirit.
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-374-12130-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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