by Anne Lovett ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 17, 2019
A richly detailed and thoroughly entertaining historical tale.
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A runaway farm girl sets out to find her brother in Lovett’s (Saving Miss Lillian, 2017, etc.) latest novel.
In the summer of 1924, 14-and-a-half-year-old Tenny Chance heads to Ashbyville, Georgia, after running away from the tenant shack on a Georgia plantation where she lived with her family. Her brother, Byron, had hopped a freight train after her mother’s death and never returned. Tenny also suspected that her father, an alcoholic, may have tried to sell her to their landlord for $25. Her dream is to find Byron and make sufficient money to return to the shack and save the rest of her family from hardship. On her way to Ashbyville, Tenny is secretly photographed bathing in a river by 17-year-old Gussie Pemberton and her young cousin Pete Godwin. Gussie’s family farm is struggling to make profit, and she’s dazzled by the thought of making it as a photographer in New York City. Meanwhile, Pete can’t stop thinking about Tenny. The fate of these characters becomes intriguingly intertwined as they search for success and happiness—but a conniving new mill manager, Ned Fletcher, could put their dreams in jeopardy. This novel has several appealing aspects, including the descriptive ease with which Lovett writes—an unfussy, unhurried style that quickly becomes endearing: “Somewhere the river rustled and birds chirped in the trees and August insects filled the air with humming.” As in her previous novels, Lovett proves herself to be a master of plot; the relationship between Tenny, who’s striving to pull herself out of the gutter, and Gussie, who’s reaching for the stars, could easily feel contrived, but it never does. Lovett unfurls the narrative with a tantalizing slowness that allows her to fully develop her characters, and readers will find themselves rooting for them. The denouement may feel a bit too polished for some readers, but others will find it deeply moving.
A richly detailed and thoroughly entertaining historical tale.Pub Date: June 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9996579-5-9
Page Count: 572
Publisher: Words of Passion
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Anne Lovett
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by Anne Lovett
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2004
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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by Han Kang ; translated by Deborah Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 2, 2016
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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by Han Kang ; translated by Deborah Smith & Emily Yae Won
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by Han Kang translated by Deborah Smith
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