A tense and absorbing family tale.
A debut drama revolves around a theme of domestic abuse and the resolution of age-old grudges.
When readers first meet the Coxes, they are preparing for a homecoming of sorts. It seems like a happy occasion, and it is, for some. A son, Bradley, is returning home after eight years in prison for killing his father. Leah, Bradley’s mother, and Thelma, his aunt, are in the kitchen making food while his sisters, Vanessa and Mary Kay, are hanging a banner. The point of view switches between characters to set up the story. Vanessa remembers visiting Bradley, her best friend, in prison. Mary Kay wonders whether anyone thinks about their father, Brad Sr., and how he doted on her. Leah remembers the hell of the trial and the therapy that didn’t help. Bradley is about to be a free man for the first time in his adult life, and his homecoming means family members will have to deal with the feelings they have swallowed for eight years. Uncle Joey puts Bradley to work in construction. Vanessa and Bradley try to make up for lost time as siblings. Things are fragile but stable at first. Then Bradley starts drinking, which strains his relationship with his mother, especially because he’s living with her. He makes a bad decision that alienates Vanessa. Everyone remembers years of Brad Sr. physically and mentally abusing Leah and the kids while no one, not even Joey and Thelma, did anything about it. May’s characters and their relationships are well-drawn; this is a lucid tale dealing with serious issues that is worth reading. But it has some pervasive structural problems. Because everyone is living in the past, the novel feels like a long compilation of flashbacks. Characters are stranded in the present while the narrative looks back (“After Vanessa left, Bradley carried their empty coffee cups over and set them in the sink. Memories flooded him. Kitchen memories. His father coming home from work in one of his moods, throwing food, breaking dishes”). And there are no chapters, though the volume is split into four parts with an occasional line break. That doesn’t ruin the book, but it does dull the impact of an otherwise compelling story.
A tense and absorbing family tale.Pub Date: June 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5465-9951-7
Page Count: 356
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York.
When advertising executive Schroff answered a child’s request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. Schroff acknowledges risks—including the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic divides—but does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism. She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. With the assistance of People human-interest writer Tresniowski (Tiger Virtues, 2005, etc.), Schroff adheres to a personal narrative that traces her troubled relationship with her father, her meetings with Maurice and his background, all while avoiding direct parallels, noting that their childhoods differed in severity even if they shared similar emotional voids. With feel-good dramatizations, the story seldom transcends the message that reaching out makes a difference. It is framed in simple terms, from attributing the first meeting to “two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams” that were “somehow meant to be friends” to the conclusion that love is a driving force. Admirably, Schroff notes that she did not seek a role as a “substitute parent,” and she does not judge Maurice’s mother for her lifestyle. That both main figures experience a few setbacks yet eventually survive is never in question; the story fittingly concludes with an epilogue by Maurice. For readers seeking an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4251-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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