Too talky by half, and the pensive, sometimes gloomy atmosphere, though well suited to the San Francisco fog, won’t appeal...
It’s 1962. The world is about to change, and Inez Roseman can’t wait for it to do so—or to check out of its travails.
Former Hungry Mind Review editor Schneider turns in a prequel to Secret Love (2001), a title more suited to this book than to its predecessor. Inez is a talented if moody violinist for the San Francisco Symphony; it doesn’t help that she’s turning 40 and that her husband, a flashy attorney, has become an accomplished philanderer and now speaks to her mostly when he wants to criticize her: “If I wanted to marry Olive Oyl, I’d have married Olive Oyl.” “Inez, you can’t play the gas pedal like it’s the pedal on a bass drum.” Jake Roseman is a skilled bon vivant, mixes a fine highball, and makes a lot of money, but he’s not much of a husband, and Inez, embarking on a difficult solo career, needs more attention than he seems willing to give. Enter Sylvia Bran, a plain but beguiling woman ten years Inez’s junior, who introduces herself as a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle wanting to do a profile of Inez. Her would-be subject has never seen her byline, and therein hangs a good part of Schneider’s tale, which, if sometimes melodramatic, is always believable and hits the right period-detail notes. This is true even when Schneider turns up the heat between Inez and Sylvia, threatening to scald a few eyeballs in the process; though the result is plenty steamy, there’s also the nodding understanding between the two that though this sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen in their day and age (“ ‘Do you think it’s terribly unnatural?’ Sylvia asks”), it does. And so do many other things that, in the end, tear the Rosemans’ house apart, thus setting the stage for what follows in Secret Love.
Too talky by half, and the pensive, sometimes gloomy atmosphere, though well suited to the San Francisco fog, won’t appeal to readers in need of cheering up. Still, Schneider spins a good yarn—and he knows his Mendelsohn.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-5442-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a...
Morrison's truly majestic fifth novel—strong and intricate in craft; devastating in impact.
Set in post-Civil War Ohio, this is the story of how former slaves, psychically crippled by years of outrage to their bodies and their humanity, attempt to "beat back the past," while the ghosts and wounds of that past ravage the present. The Ohio house where Sethe and her second daughter, 10-year-old Denver, live in 1873 is "spiteful. Full of a [dead] baby's venom." Sethe's mother-in-law, a good woman who preached freedom to slave minds, has died grieving. It was she who nursed Sethe, the runaway—near death with a newborn—and gave her a brief spell of contentment when Sethe was reunited with her two boys and first baby daughter. But the boys have by now run off, scared, and the murdered first daughter "has palsied the house" with rage. Then to the possessed house comes Paul D., one of the "Pauls" who, along with Sethe, had been a slave on the "Sweet Home" plantation under two owners—one "enlightened," one vicious. (But was there much difference between them?) Sethe will honor Paul D.'s humiliated manhood; Paul D. will banish Sethe's ghost, and hear her stories from the past. But the one story she does not tell him will later drive him away—as it drove away her boys, and as it drove away the neighbors. Before he leaves, Paul D. will be baffled and anxious about Sethe's devotion to the strange, scattered and beautiful lost girl, "Beloved." Then, isolated and alone together for years, the three women will cling to one another as mother, daughter, and sister—found at last and redeemed. Finally, the ex-slave community, rebuilding on ashes, will intervene, and Beloved's tortured vision of a mother's love—refracted through a short nightmare life—will end with her death.
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a victim's dark violence, with a lyrical insistence and a clear sense of the time when a beleaguered peoples' "only grace...was the grace they could imagine."Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1987
ISBN: 9781400033416
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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