Not enjoyable, even a little distasteful.
A descendent of John D. Rockefeller, Norton debuts with a coming-of-age novel about another poor little rich girl who suffers neglect and abuse at the hands of her villainous mother.
In 1978 Chicago, 10-year-old Bettina lives in fear and fascination of her mother: Babs Ballentyne, heiress to the Ballentyne chocolate fortune, is an unfortunate cross between Auntie Mame and Mommy Dearest, spoiled, egotistical and despotic. Although Bettina describes her as a blond beauty in the Grace Kelly mold, Babs is unrelentingly crass and hates anything that smacks of intellect or emotion. Whether she loves her daughter is unclear, but bookish, sensitive Bettina irritates the controlling Babs to no end. When Babs discovers a forbidden can of ginger ale in Bettina’s room, she goes berserk and destroys Bettina’s most prized possession. What Babs loves, besides profanity and cigarettes, is sex; and she describes to Bettina in prurient detail the sex she’s enjoying with her married boyfriend, Mack. Over the next couple of years as the relationship waxes and wanes, Mack becomes the one semidependable adult in Bettina’s life, not counting a stereotypical black cook. But shortly after returning to his wife, Mack dies in a drunken car accident. Cut to 1983. Bettina arrives at prep school in New Hampshire alone with one suitcase and a lot of travelers’ checks. She’s not very interested in her genuinely nice roommate (Bettina’s condescending attitudes toward anyone middle class, not to mention her tone of low-key anti-Semitism, may be inherited but limit a reader’s sympathy). Meredith, the preppy mean girl down the hall, becomes Bettina’s obsession, whom she wants to impress and defeat, especially when she realizes Meredith’s on-again-off-again boyfriend is Mack’s son. Soon Bettina is navigating her sexual awakening with side roads into sadomasochism. Babs disappears from the story for a while but shows up in time to ruin a little more of Bettina’s life before her final exit. Bettina ends her flat-footed narration not on a note of growth or self-awareness, but one of enduring blame.
Not enjoyable, even a little distasteful.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-84004-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
A strong, absorbing Chilean family chronicle, plushly upholstered—with mystical undercurrents (psychic phenomena) and a measure of leftward political commitment. (The author is a cousin of ex-Pres. Salvador Allende, an ill-fated socialist.) The Truebas are estate-owners of independent wealth, of whom only one—the eventual patriarch, Esteban—fully plays his class role. Headstrong and conservative, Esteban is a piggish youth, mistreating his peons and casually raping his girl servants . . . until he falls under the spell of young Clara DelValle: mute for nine years after witnessing the gruesome autopsy of her equally delicate sister, Clara is capable of telekinesis and soothsaying; she's a pure creature of the upper realms who has somehow dropped into crude daily life. So, with opposites attracting, the marriage of Esteban and Clara is inevitable—as is the succession of Clara-influenced children and grandchildren. Daughter Blanca ignores Class barriers to fall in love with—and bear a child by—the foreman's son, who will later become a famous leftwing troubadour (on the model of Victor Jara). Twin boys Jaime and Nicholas head off in different directions—one growing up to become a committed physician, the other a mystic/entrepreneur. And Alba, the last clairvoyant female of the lineage, will end the novel in a concentration camp of the Pinochet regime. Allende handles the theosophical elements here matter-of-factly: the paranormal powers of the Trueba women have to be taken more or less on faith. (Veteran readers of Latin American fiction have come to expect mysticism as part of the territory.) And the political sweep sometimes seems excessively insistent or obtrusive: even old Esteban recants from his reactionary ways at the end, when they seem to destroy his family. ("Thus the months went by, and it became clear to everyone, even Senator Trueba, that the military had seized power to keep it for themselves and not hand the country over to the politicians of the right who made the coup possible.") But there's a comfortable, appealing professionalism to Allende's narration, slowly turning the years through the Truebas' passions and secrets and fidelities. She doesn't rush; the characters are clear and sharp; there's style here but nothing self-conscious or pretentious. So, even if this saga isn't really much deeper than the Belva Plain variety, it's uncommonly satisfying—with sturdy, old-fashioned storytelling and a fine array of exotic, historical shadings.
Pub Date: May 23, 1985
ISBN: 0553383809
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1985
BOOK TO SCREEN
APPRECIATIONS
BOOK TO SCREEN
An unusual but imperfectly realized blend of trivia and tragedy.
A wine expert in training visits her family’s vineyard in Burgundy only to discover a cellar full of secrets.
Kate Elliott, a San Francisco sommelier and daughter of a French expatriate, is preparing for a notoriously difficult wine-tasting exam. If she passes (most don’t), she will be one of a tiny cadre of certified Masters of Wine worldwide. She has repeatedly flunked the test; her weakness is French whites, so some serious cramming at Domaine Charpin, her ancestral vineyard, is in order. There, Kate rejoins Heather, her best friend from college, who married her cousin Nico, the Domaine’s current vintner. Kate herself almost wed a vigneron, Nico’s neighbor Jean-Luc, but feared being trapped in domesticity. Decluttering the family caves, Kate and Heather discover the World War II–era effects of one Hélène Charpin—her great half-aunt, Kate learns. Why, then, do the Charpins, particularly dour Uncle Philippe, seem determined to excise Hélène from family memory? Interspersed with Kate’s first-person narration are excerpts from Hélène’s wartime diary, which her descendants have yet to find. A budding chemist whose university plans were dashed by the German invasion of France, Hélène and her best friend, Rose, who is Jewish, are recruited by the Resistance. Hélène’s father, Edouard, is also a Résistant, unbeknownst to her stepmother, who embraces the new status quo. In the present, the little Kate is able to glean from the historical archives reveals that Hélène was punished as a collaborator, one of the women whose heads were shaved, post-Occupation, as a badge of shame. An extensive subplot, concerning a hidden wine cache and another sommelier’s duplicity, adds little, whereas the central question—what is up with the Charpins?—is sadly underdeveloped. The apparent estrangement not only between the Charpins and Philippe’s sister Céline, Kate’s mother, but between mother and daughter remains unexplored. Wine buffs will enjoy the detailed descriptions of viticulture and the sommelier’s art. Mah deserves credit at least for raising a still-taboo subject—the barbaric and unjust treatment of accused female collaborators after the Allied liberation of France.
An unusual but imperfectly realized blend of trivia and tragedy.Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-282331-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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