Kabak’s gift for describing wonderful food and décor, and her way of encapsulating decades in a few swift strokes, take this...
A woman in her 40s sheds toxic parents and boorish husband for Provençal sun.
British author Kabak’s debut opens on a Sunday in 1995, when Kate Fanshaw, née Cadogan, returns to her suburban home—lovingly restored and renovated over 18 years—to find it trashed after her teenage son’s house party. She gets no sympathy from her jock husband Rodney, who merely plunks himself in front of the telly with his dinner. Later, she passes out and dreams of a spiral stairway leading to a door marked, well—nevermore. Nevermore will she sleep with Rodney, who has lately adopted bizarre sexual practices featuring epaulets. Thus the frame story gives way to the novel proper, a journey through ’60s, ’70s and ’80s England, detailing Kate’s coming of age and middle years. From early on, her mother, difficult, narcissistic Biddy, and her father, loving but too wussy to stand up to Biddy, disparage Kate’s interest in Domestic Science and overzealously guard her virtue. Shoehorned into an education major by her parents, she becomes an elementary schoolteacher and is betrayed by her fiancé, Jack. Her friends Moira and Ingrid and her Welsh paternal grandparents are her only constants. On the rebound from Jack, she marries prosperous Rodney but is marginalized by his eccentric family. Rodney devotes himself mostly to sports and his Masonic lodge, and doesn’t object when his smarmy pal Todd hits on Kate. Kate devotes herself to son Charlie and cooking, her weight yo-yoing. Periodically, her parents lure her home, where she falls back into her childlike posture, alternately nurtured and slapped. Back to 1995. Kate wonders why she stood it for so long, and so do we. When her mother opposes Kate’s move to France and sides with Rodney in the divorce, Kate divorces her parents as well.
Kabak’s gift for describing wonderful food and décor, and her way of encapsulating decades in a few swift strokes, take this tale beyond the standard middle-age revenge formula.Pub Date: June 16, 2005
ISBN: 0-525-94876-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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