“Women’s fiction” of the most middling sort, and a culturally privileged exercise in navel-gazing.
The author of His Mother’s Son (2003) ponders gender differences and layered haircuts in her second novel.
Hayden Risley is a stylist. After she runs away from her semi-patrician Connecticut family and spends a little time voluntarily homeless in California, she ends up working at a pleasantly bustling shop in New Jersey. Her quiet life is given a jolt when she befriends a transsexual, and she is shaken yet again when she must travel to Costa Rica to care for her injured—and estranged—father. Hayden is also a Harvard dropout. She takes hair very seriously, and so does this novel. The literature on salons is extensive, even including scholarly treatises on African-American beauty culture. Emmons is doggedly literary (hers may be the first book on hairstyling to contain epigrams by Paul Auster and Virginia Woolf and a reference to the work of Eugène Ionesco), and occasionally she conjures a resonant metaphor: “He touched the back of his hair gently, as women do, as if an infant slept beneath its layers.” There is much philosophizing here—on the nature of transformation, on the differences between men and women, on the necessity to tell stories, on the need for fruit- and floral-scented sanctuaries—but it’s seldom illuminating. Hayden’s mother, a delicate pre-Raphaelite Yankee, and her domineering and inaccessible father are exceedingly familiar. Although the author makes note of the class disparities between wealthy tourists and the servants who make their exotic idylls possible, she still presents the tropics as a paradise in which white people get to reinvent themselves. The novel’s greatest weakness, though, is its dull heroine. At best, she’s a blank onto which readers of her demographic—youngish and educated but not particularly intellectually curious—can project themselves.
“Women’s fiction” of the most middling sort, and a culturally privileged exercise in navel-gazing.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-089895-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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