In a book that is part tale, part confession, part scholarly analysis, Hong occasionally gets lost in the luxury of her own...
Gretel is all grown up but still lost in the wilderness of her own psychology in this acute and eerie reimagining of the classic fairy tale.
Hong's (Age of Glass, 2018) rendering of the iconic story includes all the familiar elements: A faithless father and wicked stepmother abandon two children in an enchanted wood, where they meet a hungry witch in her candy house. The traditional focal point of the story is when brave Gretel rescues her brother by pushing the witch into the oven, but—while the book deals with the grisly (and sticky) aftermath of the witch's demise in queasy detail—in this iteration the reader is directed to consider what comes next. H. and G. have returned home to their father's cottage and grown up. H., who "had always wanted to go home," who "wanted badly to believe that his Father loved him...that it was only temporary insanity that had made him pack his children off into the forest," has kept living the life that was meant for him before his abandonment. G., on the other hand, has remained the same girl "who had survived a great trial through remarkable grit, force, luck, and ruthless decisiveness" and has left home at the age of 10 with nothing but a small red box and her abbreviated name. Both H. and G. carry with them the laborious scars of their childhood, and Hong brings to bear her considerable formal talents as a poet as she explores the nuances of those scars. Told in the form of poems, lists, outlines, dreams, and endless, cyclical alternatives, the book pushes past the blueprint of the story's original framework and delves into the hazy realms of identity, memory, pain, and healing. Eventually, Hong comes to a specific and slippery truth about the societies we embed ourselves within: "Abundance and logic can cure everything but heartache and the drive to drown it or kill it."
In a book that is part tale, part confession, part scholarly analysis, Hong occasionally gets lost in the luxury of her own language. What remains, however, rises above a simple modernization to gleam as tantalizing and as strange as the wink of a pane of sugar glass glimpsed through the boughs of the deep, dark woods.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-940090-08-5
Page Count: 59
Publisher: Sidebrow Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2018
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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