An entertaining novel that paints a fine portrait of 1960s New York, even if it does sometimes plow familiar dramatic...
In this novel of a New York City Italian-American family in the 1960s, a mother and daughter both long for love but end up with drama.
Thirty-four-year-old Maria Campisi is an unhappy wife and mother. Her large family gathers every Sunday night for dinner, and during this weekly ritual, her husband, Luigi, berates her, her sister-in-law looks down on her, and her mother-in-law, Nonna, belittles her. However, she takes some solace in the fact that people often mistake her to be her daughter’s sister. Meanwhile, her daughter, 15-year-old Angelina, dresses like a greaser and goes to bra-burning protests with her friends. Their lives both change when Luigi hires contractors to work on their house—among them the handsome Pasquale. Maria feels an immediate attraction to him, basking in the glow of his attention and compliments. But Angelina also swoons over Pasquale, especially after her own boyfriend, Ford, pressures her into sex she doesn’t want to have. Family tensions at home make matters worse, as Nonna keeps disappearing for hours at a time and acting mysterious. Maria gets in too deep with Pasquale, and as she backpedals, Angelina tries to use him as a pawn in a plan of her own. But when Luigi catches Pasquale in his teenage daughter’s bed, Pasquale is arrested, Maria is beside herself; meanwhile, Angelina and Nonna still both have secrets. The women of the family will have to come together for the Campisis to have a happy ending. The story unfolds amidst the volatile events of the ’60s, including the Vietnam War, “free love” and women’s liberation. These cultural markers are sometimes heavy-handed, but they’re tempered slightly by the effectively used signposts of an urban Italian-American family: cannoli, marinara sauce, stickball and more. With two first-person narrators telling the story—mother and daughter in alternating chapters—the novel sometimes reads like a diary, as they both reveal their feelings and grievances. Overall, however, the characters are compelling and well-drawn, and the story moves at a quick clip. Some readers may wish for a different, more independent ending for the heroines, but they’ll at least get the satisfaction of watching mother and daughter come together.
An entertaining novel that paints a fine portrait of 1960s New York, even if it does sometimes plow familiar dramatic territory.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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