A historical romance that lacks both historical grounding and touching romance.
The driest slice of historical fiction aimlessly following one woman’s insipid life.
When her mother passes away, 16-year-old Pheobe Mae leaves her childhood home to live with her older married sister. Tensions develop between the siblings, and Pheobe marries an apparent stranger to escape her family. Luther Ben and Pheobe then head west to the open plains of Texas. An unfortunate riding accident leaves Pheobe widowed, but while recovering on an African-American couple’s farm, she meets Pleasant McClain, a suave frontiersman who apparently wants to assist Pheobe in securing her husband’s homestead. McClain’s gambling issues force the now-pregnant Pheobe to hasten off with him and his winnings. Despite a rocky marriage, Pheobe settles into frontier life, but when Pleasant is accidentally killed, Pheobe moves to the New Mexico ranch he purchased before his death. There, Pheobe finds her affections divided between two men, wealthy Mr. Harvey Bearden and Frenchman Paulo. The latter eventually returns to France, after which Pheobe addresses her inner turmoil over her mother’s suicide and marries Harvey. All these characters plod joylessly toward the end of the tale, forced into action by the author’s will. Givens’ characters lack compelling personalities and have no more substance than their names. Instead, the author deluges readers with folksy language and odd phrases, both of which appear sloppy rather than authentic. Pheobe’s guilt over her mother’s suicide, apparently the basis for her unhappiness, is not communicated until the last moments of the narrative–but then neither is Pheobe’s supposed dissatisfaction. The reason for the story’s historic setting is unclear, as the time period is never explored, further befuddling readers. The nearly transparent plot would be served just as well in a contemporary setting. Despite her three husbands and one lover, Pheobe is a sexless creature without connection to or passion with any of the four men she encounters. The few acts of intimacy are so flat as to further alienate the reader.
A historical romance that lacks both historical grounding and touching romance.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2006
ISBN: 978-1-4134-7819-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York.
When advertising executive Schroff answered a child’s request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. Schroff acknowledges risks—including the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic divides—but does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism. She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. With the assistance of People human-interest writer Tresniowski (Tiger Virtues, 2005, etc.), Schroff adheres to a personal narrative that traces her troubled relationship with her father, her meetings with Maurice and his background, all while avoiding direct parallels, noting that their childhoods differed in severity even if they shared similar emotional voids. With feel-good dramatizations, the story seldom transcends the message that reaching out makes a difference. It is framed in simple terms, from attributing the first meeting to “two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams” that were “somehow meant to be friends” to the conclusion that love is a driving force. Admirably, Schroff notes that she did not seek a role as a “substitute parent,” and she does not judge Maurice’s mother for her lifestyle. That both main figures experience a few setbacks yet eventually survive is never in question; the story fittingly concludes with an epilogue by Maurice. For readers seeking an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4251-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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