An allegory of old society confronting a new world, and a rollicking good read.
Kat Warren-Bineki didn't join the National Guard to see the world. She joined to escape the rusty tentacles of Warrenside, a depressed steel town—and to avoid her mother.
But Kat cannot elude Warrenside's woes even in Afghanistan. Her closest friend, Duck Wolinsky, also enlisted. Duck intends to marry Kat even if she isn't entirely convinced. Other locals include Jenna Magee, a proselytizing Christian not averse to occasional casual sex. Then there's the rough-and-tumble Reuber and Camacho. Most importantly, there's Max Asad, only son of Dr. Edward Asad, a cultured Lebanese immigrant and owner of most of Warrenside's downtown, including the Lucky Lady, a strip club where his Korean mistress lives. A loner at home, Max was also isolated in Afghanistan, shanghaied to serve as Special Ops interpreter while other Warrensiders worked in the rear echelon and partied. As the unit travels home, Max and Kat fall in love—a troubling situation since Kat is the scion of the founding family and Max has a traditional arranged marriage awaiting him. Then the Catawissa River bursts its banks, flooding Warrenside's downtown, and the Guard unit is activated again. Monk's debut novel follows different characters with each chapter, including Duck, obsessed with marriage to Kat; Barbara Warren-Bineki, Kat's mother, coping with "chemicals" that sometimes cause her to strip nude and walk Warrenside's neighborhoods; Mike, Kat's father, whose heritage barred entry into old-money society, which spurred an embezzlement caper; Wind Storm, a half-Swedish Lenape Indian, a love shaman, which adds a dash of magic realism to the saga; and Houda, the Asad's daughter, possessing the tough-minded acumen and ambition he wants in a son. The flood destroys old Warrenside, the Asads have a chance to demolish the ruins and build a casino, but the good fortune (Asad means lucky in Arabic) comes at a cruel price.
An allegory of old society confronting a new world, and a rollicking good read.Pub Date: March 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-22344-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
A short, elegant tale about female desire and societal expectations.
An aspiring writer finds a way to live the life she’s always wanted.
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf wrote that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”—and that sentiment echoes through Cain’s (Creature, 2013, etc.) debut novel. The protagonist, Vitória, a young and bright museum cleaning woman, spends her days dreaming about writing. In the moments between scrubbing toilets and floors, she writes descriptions of paintings and notices the world around her. Soon she is plucked from her life by a rich husband and placed into another. Her new life is complete with a large house, a personal study, and a maid, who serves as a constant reminder of her own upward social mobility. Despite her good fortune, Vitória is unhappy. At one point, Vitória wonders about her good luck and how she was “saved” from a wholly different life. She writes about a glue factory where women work and horses are sacrificed: “We should memorialize the horses, remember them truthfully, and the women who have to spend their days in that way....I have benefited from a woman who never stops working, walking back from the factory in the morning and the night.” She recognizes the sacrifices women make and, more importantly, the ones she no longer has to make. Deeply rooted in the literary tradition, the novel inconspicuously references works like Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and Octavia Butler’s Kindred and explores themes like class and gender. With its short, spare sentences, Cain’s writing seems simple on the surface—but it is deeply observant of the human condition, female friendships, and art.
A short, elegant tale about female desire and societal expectations.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-14837-9
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Earnestly done, and correctly, but information trumps drama, and the heart is left out.
A carefully researched little novel, Otsuka’s first, about the US internment of Japanese citizens during WWII that’s perfect down to the tiniest detail but doesn’t stir the heart.
Shortly after the war begins, the father of an unnamed Japanese family of four in Berkeley, California, is taken from his home—not even given time to dress—and held for questioning. His wife and two children won’t see him until after war’s end four years later, when he’ll have been transformed into a suddenly very old man, afraid, broken, and unwilling to speak even a word about what happened to him. Meanwhile, from the spring of 1942 until the autumn after the armistice, the mother, age 42, with her son and daughter of 8 and 11, respectively, will be held in camps in high-desert Utah, treeless and windswept, where they’ll live in rows of wooden barracks offering little privacy, few amenities, and causing them to suffer—the mother especially—greater and greater difficulty in hanging on to any sense of hope or normality. The characters are denied even first names, perhaps as a way of giving them universality, but the device does nothing to counteract the reader’s ongoing difficulty in entering into them. Details abound—book titles, contemporary references (the Dionne quints, sugar rationing), keepsakes the children take to the camp (a watch, a blue stone), euthanizing the family dog the night before leaving for the camps—but still the narrative remains stubbornly at the surface, almost like an informational flow, causing the reader duly to acknowledge these many wrongs done to this unjustly uprooted and now appallingly deprived American family—but never finding a way to go deeper, to a place where the attention will be held rigid and the heart seized.
Earnestly done, and correctly, but information trumps drama, and the heart is left out.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41429-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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