Engaging, sweeping saga of a contemporary wife and mother.
Lori Weinberg contends with her husband’s alcoholism, her daughter’s illness and her aloof mother’s Holocaust past in this piece of women’s fiction.
Lori’s husband, Jerry, falls off the wagon at their son’s wedding and is hauled off to a police station. “Can you believe the hell I’ve gone through with this man for the last thirty years?” she cries to her longtime best friend, Adele. The novel then shifts from 2001 to 1970, when Jerry takes Lori, raised in a posh North Shore suburb, into a lower-class Chicago neighborhood to meet his family. The Brills are more boisterous and strictly observant Jews than Lori’s family, which consists only of a “mom who is always sick, and a dad who is always gone.” Lori soon marries Jerry and becomes mother to Julie and Barry. Jerry works as a salesman for the dental equipment business that is only one source of income for Adele’s more successful husband, Jim. It then becomes increasingly apparent that Jerry is an alcoholic; plus, one of his brothers is always hatching financial schemes. When 14-year-old Julie is diagnosed with leukemia, Lori puts all other concerns on hold to deal with the brave girl’s journey, which includes a desire to visit Israel. As several deaths unfold, Lori forces Jerry to go into rehab in Arizona, where she meets Rain, a free-spirited woman with surprising connections to Chicago. The novel concludes in 2003, with Lori now able to stand on her own, empowered by a trip to Germany that unlocked the secrets of her now-dead mother’s sorrow. Author Wexler wrote several murder mysteries prior to penning this tale of a sheltered yet relatable woman facing a significant array of life challenges. Wexler’s scenes featuring Julie’s illness are particularly strong, being both heartfelt and heartbreaking. Lori’s attitude toward her husband is more puzzling; she often seems unsympathetic, even when his own childhood issues are exposed. Lori’s dynamics with female friends, her mother and her Jewish heritage are all intriguing but feel a bit rushed and underdeveloped within this expansive novel.
Engaging, sweeping saga of a contemporary wife and mother.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500431051
Page Count: 342
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.
Hailed as heroes on a stateside tour before returning to Iraq, Bravo Squad discovers just what it has been fighting for.
Though the shellshocked humor will likely conjure comparisons with Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five, the debut novel by Fountain (following his story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, 2006) focuses even more on the cross-promotional media monster that America has become than it does on the absurdities of war. The entire novel takes place over a single Thanksgiving Day, when the eight soldiers (with their memories of the two who didn’t make it) find themselves at the promotional center of an all-American extravaganza, a nationally televised Dallas Cowboys football game. Providing the novel with its moral compass is protagonist Billy Lynn, a 19-year-old virgin from small-town Texas who has been inflated into some kind of cross between John Wayne and Audie Murphy for his role in a rescue mission documented by an embedded Fox News camera. In two days, the Pentagon-sponsored “Victory Tour” will end and Bravo will return to the business as usual of war. In the meantime, they are dealing with a producer trying to negotiate a film deal (“Think Rocky meets Platoon,” though Hilary Swank is rumored to be attached), glad-handing with the corporate elite of Cowboy fandom (and ownership), and suffering collateral damage during a halftime spectacle with Beyoncé. Over the course of this long, alcohol-fueled day, Billy finds himself torn, as he falls in love (and lust) with a devout Christian cheerleader and listens to his sister try to persuade him that he has done his duty and should refuse to go back. As “Americans fight the war daily in their strenuous inner lives,” Billy and his foxhole brethren discover treachery and betrayal beyond anything they’ve experienced on the battlefield.
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-088559-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.
Glück’s international reputation as an accomplished and critically acclaimed contemporary poet makes the arrival of her new volume an eagerly anticipated event. This slender collection meets these expectations with 44 poems that pull the reader into a realm of meditation and memory. She sets most of them in the heat of summer—a time of year when nature seems almost oppressively heavy with life—in order to meditate on the myriad realities posed by life and death. Glück mines common childhood images (a grandmother transforming summer fruit into a cool beverage, two sisters applying fingernail polish in a backyard) to resurrect the intense feelings that accompany awakening to the sensual promises of life, and she desperately explores these resonant images, searching for a path that might reconcile her to the inevitability of death. These musings produce the kinds of spiritual insights that draw so many readers to her work: she suggests that we perceive our experiences most intensely when tempered by memory, and that such experiences somehow provide meaning for our lives. Yet for all her metaphysical sensitivity and poetic craftsmanship, Glück reaffirms our ultimate fate: we all eventually die. Rather than resort to pithy mysticism or self-obsessive angst, she boldly insists that death creeps in the shadows of even our brightest summers. The genius of her poems lies in their ability to sear the summertime onto our souls in such a way that its “light will give us no peace.”
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.Pub Date: April 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018526-0
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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