An uneven debut traces the fall of two brothers growing up in Los Angeles.
Gabe and Tomas are teenagers being raised by their Filipino mother. Their Anglo-American father, long-gone, has left them with little more than a mixed heritage that challenges both their sense of self and place in the world. Gabe, the good younger son, watches silently as his brother, sporting the tattoos and attire of a Mexican gang member, plummets further into a threatening world of theft and brutality. Expelled from school, Tomas turns to breeding and training attack dogs for L.A. hotshots, a profession that brings little comfort to their timid, hard-working mother. Out of the blue, both to the family and the reader, Gabe steals Tomas’s car, sells his favorite dog, and runs away with the money, fleeing the kind of desperate life that seems his inevitable fate. Heading north, with no plan or destination, Gabe imagines the eyes of strangers on him in nondescript truck stops and cafés. He feels more isolated than ever. When his car breaks down just south of the Oregon border, Gabe is befriended by a tow-truck driver who shares in conversation his disdain for L.A.—overrun, as he puts it, with Asians and Mexicans. Unbeknownst to Gabe, the driver has called his mother, knowing the kid must be running away. Returned to L.A., Gabe has to pay back Tomas, who forces his younger brother into a life of crime and violence. They steal drugs from a dealer, plumbing from a fancy home, and in the disturbing conclusion beat a boy who has done nothing. Gabe’s narrative succeeds in displaying the kind of cultural isolation that breeds anger, turning a smart, quiet boy into an avenging victim despite his wish to do the right thing. The author creates a few piercing images, but, overall, the plotting is thin, leaving behind an impression rather than a fully realized story.
Far from perfect, but a new voice to watch.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-32154-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
Categories: FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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With her second novel, Ng further proves she’s a sensitive, insightful writer with a striking ability to illuminate life in...
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This incandescent portrait of suburbia and family, creativity, and consumerism burns bright.
It’s not for nothing that Ng (Everything I Never Told You, 2014) begins her second novel, about the events leading to the burning of the home of an outwardly perfect-seeming family in Shaker Heights, Ohio, circa 1997, with two epigraphs about the planned community itself—attesting to its ability to provide its residents with “protection forever against…unwelcome change” and “a rather happy life” in Utopia. But unwelcome change is precisely what disrupts the Richardson family’s rather happy life, when Mia, a charismatic, somewhat mysterious artist, and her smart, shy 15-year-old daughter, Pearl, move to town and become tenants in a rental house Mrs. Richardson inherited from her parents. Mia and Pearl live a markedly different life from the Richardsons, an affluent couple and their four high school–age children—making art instead of money (apart from what little they need to get by); rooted in each other rather than a particular place (packing up what fits in their battered VW and moving on when “the bug” hits); and assembling a hodgepodge home from creatively repurposed, scavenged castoffs and love rather than gathering around them the symbols of a successful life in the American suburbs (a big house, a large family, gleaming appliances, chic clothes, many cars). What really sets Mia and Pearl apart and sets in motion the events leading to the “little fires everywhere” that will consume the Richardsons’ secure, stable world, however, is the way they hew to their own rules. In a place like Shaker Heights, a town built on plans and rules, and for a family like the Richardsons, who have structured their lives according to them, disdain for conformity acts as an accelerant, setting fire to the dormant sparks within them. The ultimate effect is cataclysmic. As in Everything I Never Told You, Ng conjures a sense of place and displacement and shows a remarkable ability to see—and reveal—a story from different perspectives. The characters she creates here are wonderfully appealing, and watching their paths connect—like little trails of flame leading inexorably toward one another to create a big inferno—is mesmerizing, casting into new light ideas about creativity and consumerism, parenthood and privilege.
With her second novel, Ng further proves she’s a sensitive, insightful writer with a striking ability to illuminate life in America.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2429-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A heartwarming portrait of a broken heart finding a little healing magic.
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After acing a job interview and accepting a marriage proposal, Dannie Kohan has had the perfect day. That is, until she awakens to find herself five years in the future with a completely different man.
Just one hour in that alternate reality shakes Dannie to her core. After all, highly ambitious Dannie and her boyfriend, David, have plotted out their lives in minute detail, and the sexy man in her dream—was it a dream?—is most certainly not in the script. Serle (The Dinner List, 2018) deftly spins these magical threads into Dannie’s perfectly structured life, leaving not only Dannie, but also the reader wondering whether Dannie time traveled or hallucinated. Her best friend, Bella, would delight in the story given that she thinks Dannie is much too straight-laced, and some spicy dreaming might push Dannie to find someone more passionate than David. Unfortunately, glamorous Bella is in Europe with her latest lover. Ever pragmatic, Dannie consults her therapist, who almost concurs that it was likely a dream, and throws herself into her work. Pleased to have landed the job at a prestigious law firm, Dannie easily loses her worries in litigation. Soon four and a half years have passed with no wedding date set, and Bella is back in the U.S. with a new man in her life. A man who turns out to be literally the man of Dannie’s dream. The sheer fact of Aaron Gregory’s existence forces Dannie to reevaluate her trust in the laws of physics as well as her decision to marry David, a decision that seems less believable with each passing day. And as the architecture of Dannie’s overplanned life disintegrates, Serle twists and twines the remnants of her dream into a surprising future.
A heartwarming portrait of a broken heart finding a little healing magic.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3744-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
Categories: FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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