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
BOOK REVIEW
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
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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