THE TIME IN BETWEEN

Name: THE TIME IN BETWEEN
Author: David Bergen
ISBN: 1-4000-6240-3

by David Bergen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 13, 2005

A beautifully composed, unflinching and harrowing story. Perhaps the best fiction yet to confront and comprehend the legacy...

bookshelf

A Canadian soldier’s return to Vietnam 30 years after the war sends powerful ripple effects throughout several lives, in Winnipeg author Bergen’s moving fifth novel.

A brief prologue locates Charles Boatman’s adult daughter Ada and her younger brother Jon in Danang, seeking Charles, who has disappeared. Bergen then juxtaposes multiple stories. We learn of Charles’s youth in Washington state, years of marriage and fatherhood in British Columbia and separate traumatic experiences in combat halfway around the world, and back home, where he’s confronted by his wife Sara’s infidelity, and her early death. Then, as he seeks the past in postwar Vietnam (“thinking . . . he might conclude an event in his life that had consumed and shaped him”), Charles finds only piercing echoes of the violence he had both suffered and perpetrated, with sadly foreseeable results. A parallel narrative follows Ada’s travels and discoveries (with and without Jon) as she follows her father’s gradually fading trail, dodges the attentions of a 14-year-old hustler-entrepeneur (Yen) who appoints himself her guide and guardian, and falls into a subdued sexual relationship with a middle-aged artist (Hoang Vu) who seems as perplexed by her obsession with him as does Ada herself (“Perhaps he was the country, or her father, or simply a notion of the country, or a notion of her father”). Bergen presents “the sorrow of war” as an exfoliating fog that grips and obscures all the war’s victims—on the battlefield, in shared memories and in dreams filled with disturbing indigenous images. And, in excerpts from a combat novel written by a former North Vietnamese soldier—in which Charles (who reads it) finds his own sins and sorrows mirrored—the unity of human suffering is made stunningly, heartbreakingly clear.

A beautifully composed, unflinching and harrowing story. Perhaps the best fiction yet to confront and comprehend the legacy of Vietnam.

Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2005

ISBN: 1-4000-6240-3

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
SEE THE CHILD
by David Bergen

- BOOK REVIEW
A YEAR OF LESSER
by David Bergen

bookshelf

SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

bookshelf

Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

bookshelf

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

bookshelf

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.