Four likable women and an unusual plot that lets readers learn to know them: a fine debut.
Memory, tradition, and family are the ingredients for a tale about how food can save the soul.
Bread and Roses is an upstate New York catering firm run by four very different women: Teresa DiRosa, the owner, who puts her whole heart and soul into the business, especially now that her husband has divorced her and her son, who isn’t speaking to her, has just left for college; Delia, Teresa’s girlhood friend, who can’t cook but has a winning way with people and handles promotion; Amberlin, who bakes; and Teresa’s niece Christine, who helps with odds and ends, rounding out the cozy family of four. But something goes sorely amiss when Teresa, Delia, and Amberlin begin the two-day preparation for their annual Christmas open house and enormous feast: namely, that Christine shows up in the early morning with a gun in her purse, wanting to kill herself. Teresa, already guilty about not having done enough to help her now-dead sister Nan (Christine’s mother), in an irrational but practical fit hits her suicidal niece with a frying pan and ties her up in the cellar. The others are aghast when they discover what’s transpired but seem equally baffled about how to proceed. So the three work at rolling dough and slicing salmon while Christine waits to be untied. She’s fed up with her own life, including the awful childhood she had with her alcoholic and maybe schizophrenic mother; a psychiatrist fiancé who now thinks she may be nuts; and the seven-year anniversary of her mother’s suicide, which happens to coincide with the big party. Interwoven throughout are the memories of the four women, and gradually reconciliation emerges. Teresa’s memories of her Italian grandmother give her the hope that nourishment—of one kind or another—can make Christine well.
Four likable women and an unusual plot that lets readers learn to know them: a fine debut.Pub Date: July 11, 2000
ISBN: 0-553-80165-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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