A gripping and remarkably fine first collection of 11 stories, mapping the changing moral byways of a dying New England mill-town and angling inside the lives of the town's often warring Irish, Italian, Wasp, and newer Puerto Rican inhabitants. In ``The First Snow,'' a contemporary 17-year-old son sticks by his father—a weak, overweight, Waspy Lawton Falls junior-high teacher who has just been arrested for homosexual conduct at a highway rest-stop—even though his mother and brother have fled in horror and he is repelled, too. In ``The Miracle,'' a devoted priest called Father D'Agostino, whose parish is the poorest in Lawton Falls in the 1960's, hesitantly asks a local gangster named Davio Giaccalone for help in saving the church from demolition; a fire is set elsewhere, the church is preserved, but a homeless man dies, and D'Agostino is undone by moral pain. In ``Violet'' and ``All Best Wishes,'' contemporary town yuppies face revealing romantic crises; and in ``The Greyhounds,'' two insouciant young computer programmers from out of town steal an aging Davio Giaccalone's beloved greyhound dog—a mistake, as it turns out, since Giaccalone is still dangerous. The violence turns explicit in the ``Brothers,'' about the gang rape of a Puerto Rican girl by three Irish and Italian garage mechanics in the 1970's. The girl, Maria Mendez, is seen again in ``The Birthday Cake,'' in which an old Italian woman refuses to give up the last cake in a neighborhood bakery for Maria's daughter's birthday party. Davio Giaccalone is definitively betrayed in the elegant, almost classic ``The Last Good Man'': while maneuvering to keep the town's last mill from being closed by the Japanese, he entrusts crucial information to a newspaper reporter who, however, has resolved to learn to look out for himself. There's more—all of it rich in detail and theme.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-87023-865-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
If you read only one book about Korean heroic outlaws this season, this should be the one.
The famed saga of Korea’s bandit prince comes in for a new translation, if one that’s not quite idiomatic.
“Kick me with full force, so that I may know your strength.” Not exactly the sort of thing that one would cry out in the midst of some emotional moment, not exactly the most memorable of challenges. Yet, the statement and its rejoinder—“But after you kicked me I could feel my organs vibrate and my body shiver, so I know that you are a man of tremendous power”—alert us that we are in the Land of Translation, a place lots of readers associate with mustiness, fustiness, and all-around yawns. The most exciting of Hong Gildong’s adventures come to us in a chrome of not-quite-English. In fairness, he has many of them.The anonymous early modern epic celebrates the deeds of a lowborn lad, the son of a concubine, whose abilities—“He needed to hear only one thing to understand ten, and learning ten things allowed him to master a hundred”—did not go unremarked in court but naturally excited intrigue and jealousy. What’s a good prince to do? Go off and battle for truth, justice, and the Korean way, of course, taking up cause with the merry bandits of the Taebaek Mountains, robbing from the rich to give to the poor, and doing suchlike things that would meet with the approval of a checklist-wielding Joseph Campbell: liminality, check. Near-death experience, check. Students of comparative mythology will be interested to see how bits of other literatures (especially Arthurian) turn up in Hong Gildong’s story. The introduction might have made more of this lineage and discussed in more detail how modern Korean writers make use of the story in their work, but it does a competent job overall of placing the book in the context of Korean literature.
If you read only one book about Korean heroic outlaws this season, this should be the one.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-14-310769-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Paralyzingly prolific romancer Michaels has her ups and downs, from the total nonsense of Finders Keepers (1998) to the exemplary plotting of Celebration (p. 103), in which a wealthy woman’s husband flees with her bank account after a 20-year marriage, only to return years later with a sob story but minus the eight million he ran off with. This latest finds the author working in her wildly unlikely mode, with a big mix of mind-bending plot turns. Callie Parker has been raised on a South Carolina plantation by her wealthy father, Clemson. During her childhood and adolescence, Dad and Mama Pearl helped Callie gather three close friends to bond with: the illegitimate orphan Bode Jessup, a kind of brother and idol for Callie; Brie Canfield, whose heart leaps when Clemson takes her in as Callie’s playmate; and Sela Bronson, a poor girl famished for love and grateful for every attention from the Parker family. Comes the day of Callie’s wedding to supremely wealthy Wyn Archer, promising a future afloat on every possible luxury. But the night before the ceremony, an auto accident caused by Wyn’s careless driving puts Callie into a coma—and from the vortex of the coma will rise many “family” secrets of parentage involving the bride-to-be and her friends. Bubble upon breaking bubble as the suds pop. Strictly for the fans.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-57566-467-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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