A dense, tedious novel about combustive family issues.
Dröge’s (The Consortium, 2016, etc.) novel explores the fraught relationship between a Dutch businessman and his artist daughter.
A series of bizarre occurrences, including a high-profile art burglary, have brought Henk van Wijnen-Swarttouw’s shipyard business empire, centered in the massive port of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, teetering at the edge of collapse. He becomes distracted from these troubles, however, when he walks past the art gallery he owns and sees a painting of his naked teenage daughter hanging in the window. Julia is 18, recently graduated from high school, and taking a sabbatical year before beginning her medical studies—or so Henk hopes. During this time, he’s lent Julia the use of the gallery, but it seems that her foray into the art world is starting to snowball into a form of protest. She’s interested in environmental issues and wants her father to renounce his capitalistic practices and transform his company into a paragon of sustainability. Henk, on the other hand, becomes obsessed with knowing everything he can about his daughter’s life. Soon, Henk is seeing a psychiatrist, and he and Julia are forced to negotiate the future of their relationship—as well as the future of their Rotterdam community. That city is central to Dröge’s novel, which effectively employs a number of the city’s characters to illustrate its interconnected nature. The plot is hampered by the author’s dense prose, though, which is overwritten and given to awkward syntax: “Cor Figee crossed, while understanding as well as embarrassed he let down his hand and forced his head away from the car, in which Henk was searching for the right information on the dashboard.” Shifts between different characters’ points of view, as well as between first and third person, occur with little warning and jostle readers out of the story. Dröge does make an admirable attempt to grapple with worthy themes—environmental degradation, familial tensions, the nature of art. But his plot is less than compelling, and the reading experience ends up being something of a slog.
A dense, tedious novel about combustive family issues.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5190-8808-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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