Hauser's style is expressive, clever and compelling, and she offers readers a thoughtful and engaging debut.
Two young women trying to find their places in the world settle in a small coastal town in Maine and discover purpose, friendship and acceptance.
When Leah, a reporter, meets down-to-earth Henry Lynch in a New York City bar, she wastes no time resigning from her job, marrying him and moving into his family home in the small fishing community of Menamon. Leah’s filled with romantic notions about living an idyllic life and fitting in with the locals, but she soon discovers “from-aways” can’t easily dissolve barriers built by common roots and experiences. She also discovers there are things about Henry she doesn’t know and wonders if she fell in love with only the idea of him. Finding work at the Menamon Star, owned by her unfriendly sister-in-law, Leah meets wisecracking tough girl Quinn Winters, another recent transplant to the area. Quinn originally came to town to confront her father, Carter Marks, once a moderately successful folk singer who had an affair with her late mother, but she puts her plans on hold as she sorts through her different reactions to him. Instead, believing no one knows she’s his daughter, she remains in town, gets hired at the paper, falls in love with her roommate, and becomes a self-taught guitarist and songwriter. Quinn’s amateurish prose contrasts with Leah’s professional writing, but the two become drinking buddies and begin to collaborate on pieces. Soon they find themselves embroiled in a story about a building project that polarizes the townsfolk and threatens to change the nature of the entire community. Leah finds that her involvement might help her gain the acceptance she covets but could jeopardize her marriage. As events begin to spin out of control, debut novelist Hauser creates a palpable bond linking characters, readers, a community and a relevant political issue.
Hauser's style is expressive, clever and compelling, and she offers readers a thoughtful and engaging debut.Pub Date: May 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-231075-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.
A young man writes a letter to his illiterate mother in an attempt to make sense of his traumatic beginnings.
When Little Dog is a child growing up in Hartford, he is asked to make a family tree. Where other children draw full green branches full of relatives, Little Dog’s branches are bare, with just five names. Born in Vietnam, Little Dog now lives with his abusive—and abused—mother and his schizophrenic grandmother. The Vietnam War casts a long shadow on his life: His mother is the child of an anonymous American soldier—his grandmother survived as a sex worker during the conflict. Without siblings, without a father, Little Dog’s loneliness is exacerbated by his otherness: He is small, poor, Asian, and queer. Much of the novel recounts his first love affair as a teen, with a “redneck” from the white part of town, as he confesses to his mother how this doomed relationship is akin to his violent childhood. In telling the stories of those who exist in the margins, Little Dog says, “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” Vuong has written one of the most lauded poetry debuts in recent memory (Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016), and his first foray into fiction is poetic in the deepest sense—not merely on the level of language, but in its structure and its intelligence, moving associationally from memory to memory, quoting Barthes, then rapper 50 Cent. The result is an uncategorizable hybrid of what reads like memoir, bildungsroman, and book-length poem. More important than labels, though, is the novel’s earnest and open-hearted belief in the necessity of stories and language for our survival.
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56202-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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