Occasionally corny and preachy, but overall, an engaging, witty look at the balm of friendship.
Steel Magnolias, transferred to the café.
A familiar “feel-good” ring pervades Green’s debut novel: A small group of girlfriends meet regularly to laugh and eat, discuss everything life throws at them, regale each other with tales of their hot flashes, personal woes, etc., and come to terms with devastating loss. The distinguishing factors here are the four protagonists, all in their 60s, and the narrative’s thematic adherence to the maxims espoused in Longfellow’s life-affirming poem, “A Psalm of Life.” Each of the characters struggles with her own rather amplified demons, but in the end affirms that the greatest legacy one can leave–a subject over which each of these accomplished women obsesses–is a life well-lived. Though succumbing to cancer, the widowed pediatrician Lily realizes she’s left her mark on all the young lives she healed. Janet, the bisexual shrink with an under-medicated bipolar daughter, eventually finds love and reconciliation. Overweight, bossy Monica, a successful small-business owner, overcomes her self-image problems and discovers happiness. And Suzanne, a divorced real-estate agent, finally surmounts her attraction to her womanizing ex-husband by returning to the community theater where the foursome met 40 years before. The omniscient narrator concisely sums up the key to the group’s power: “The women individually were not the icons of strength they projected to the world. Yet, each had a unique strength that magnified when combined with the other three, creating a bond that only they could break.”
Occasionally corny and preachy, but overall, an engaging, witty look at the balm of friendship.Pub Date: April 30, 2006
ISBN: 0-978-52776-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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