Bracing and raw portrait of the inner life of a directionless, if passionate, suburban rebel.
The dark heart of a 1960s Levittown family is artfully revealed.
Shapiro (Life and Love, Such as It Is, 1999, etc.) chronicles the high-school years of Maude Pugh, the misunderstood daughter of a self-important artist and a socially awkward mother. The Pughs live in a house that seems to be the clone of a thousand others, but on the inside is utterly unique; her father has painted all the walls black to better display his artwork. Maude’s best friend Weesie thinks the house is a marvel, but Maude yearns for the understated elegance of Weesie’s upper-class Long Island manor. If the interior of Maude’s house is unusual, the interior of her family is even more so. Her mother and father split up over the course of the narrative, and her older brother Seth, unabashedly idolized by her parents, has disappeared from their lives, leaving Maude to bear the brunt of her parents’ brutalizing emotional eccentricities. Maude, chafing at her family’s restraints, secretly applies and wins a scholarship to attend Bay Farm, an elite private high school. Once there, Maude is introduced to both class ambition and class division: Her parents are uncomfortable because she is moving up the social ladder; her classmates fetishize her because she is an artist’s daughter with all of the requisite quirks; and Maude herself is caught between the knowledge that she doesn’t really belong among the very wealthy and a new sense of class difference. When Maude loses her scholarship and enrolls in community college, she finds herself even more of an outsider. Although the plot appears to follow the usual coming-of-age story are by concentrating on a typically angst-ridden adolescent girl, it has none of the loss-of-innocence rhetoric or false family resolutions that characterize the genre. Shapiro’s portrait of Maude is knife-sharp; she completely inhabits the consuming inner world of a painfully intelligent adolescent girl, showing Maude’s every mood, thought and desire with piercing clarity.
Bracing and raw portrait of the inner life of a directionless, if passionate, suburban rebel.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-56947-431-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fine first novel that enlivens familiar themes of parenthood and battles against nature.
A couple struggling to settle in the Alaskan wilderness is heartened by the arrival of the child of their dreams—or are they literally dreaming her?
Jack and Mabel, the protagonists of Ivey’s assured debut, are a couple in their early 50s who take advantage of cheap land to build a homestead in Alaska in the 1920s. But the work is backbreaking, the winters are brutally cold and their isolation only reminds them of their childlessness. There’s a glimmer of sunshine, however, in the presence of a mysterious girl who lurks near their cabin. Though she’s initially skittish, in time she becomes a fixture in the couple's lives. Ivey takes her time in clarifying whether or not the girl, Faina, is real or not, and there are good reasons to believe she’s a figment of Jack and Mabel’s imaginations: She’s a conveniently helpful good-luck charm for them in their search for food, none of their neighbors seem to have seen the girl and she can’t help but remind Mabel of fairy tales she heard in her youth about a snow child. The mystery of Faina’s provenance, along with the way she brightens the couple’s lives, gives the novel’s early chapters a slightly magical-realist cast. Yet as Faina’s identity grows clearer, the narrative also becomes a more earthbound portrait of the Alaskan wilderness and a study of the hard work involved in building a family. Ivey’s style is spare and straightforward, in keeping with the novel’s setting, and she offers enough granular detail about hunting and farming to avoid familiar pieties about the Last Frontier. The book’s tone throughout has a lovely push and pull—Alaska’s punishing landscape and rough-hewn residents pitted against Faina’s charmed appearances—and the ending is both surprising and earned.
A fine first novel that enlivens familiar themes of parenthood and battles against nature.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-316-17567-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fat pancake of a novel, the author's second hardcover production tells the life story of one Ruby Blue—from an abused childhood and youth, to years as wife of a Marine, personal liberation, life in the world of industry, and her golden years in a rural retreat. Throughout the career of Ruby Blue, monster men abound. There's Papa George in their Pennsylvania home, a slasher, smacker, and wife beater, who requires that his daughters repay him, in bucks, for the cost of raising them. Then there's Ruby's husband, Andrew (met in those WW II glory days in D.C.), who is heavy on the verbal abuse and generally amoral. Ruby's lifelong friend Dixie is regularly slugged mercilessly by husband Hugo. Ruby's longtime true love, Calvin, is a gentle soul, but his wife, Eva, is as lethal as the men; fortunately for Calvin, she lacks the biceps. Ruby weathers life with Andrew at Marine bases and puts up with his callous treatment of their two children, but after Andrew admits to having gambled away their son's college money she finally decamps to New Jersey. Ruby soldiers on with Dixie, and their kitchen cookie business goes international in no time. As for the men, they'll get theirs: Papa George is Bobbittized with scalding grape jelly; the late Hugo's ashes get lost in traffic; and Ruby dumps Calvin. But Andrew sees the light. Glop. However, bear in mind the author's smashing success in paperback, including her Texas saga (5 million sold).
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-345-36774-X
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
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