An old-fashioned, endearing romance for readers with time to spare.
Nicholls' leisurely, nostalgic, and often amusing novel traces the coming-of-age of an adolescent boy in 1997 Britain.
The author of Us (2014) homes in on one mildly eventful summer. Sixteen-year-old Charlie Lewis, looking back from a point 20 years in the future, has just finished secondary school in a little town “too far away from London to be a suburb, too large to be a village, too developed to count as countryside.” Anxious about his parents' recent separation, which has left him alone to cope with his unemployed, clinically depressed father, he hasn't been paying attention in school and flubbed his exams, making it unlikely that he will head off to university with his friends. When he's not working a few hours a week under the table at a local gas station, where he nets some extra money by pulling off a low-level scam, he's left with plenty of time on his hands. One day, after sneaking into a local estate to sit in the grass and read a Vonnegut novel, he meets and falls hard for upper-class, relatively sophisticated Fran Fisher. She agrees to go out with him for coffee a week later on the condition that he join in a local summer production of Romeo and Juliet in which she is playing Juliet. Reluctantly, he does so and learns to love Shakespeare as well as Fran. Narrator Charlie, now happily on the brink of marrying someone else, looks back on this period of his life with affection and a touch of compassion for the bewildered boy he used to be. While the narrative stakes aren't very high and the plot ambles through some predictable paces, the developing relationship between the two young lovers is charming, with none of the feverish highs or lows of the play they often reference. Charlie and his theatrical colleagues make good company, and even the fraught family situation is satisfactorily resolved.
An old-fashioned, endearing romance for readers with time to spare.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-358-24836-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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
Bestselling Hannah (True Colors, 2009, etc.) sabotages a worthy effort with an overly neat resolution.
A Russian refugee’s terrible secret overshadows her family life.
Meredith, heir apparent to her family’s thriving Washington State apple enterprises, and Nina, a globetrotting photojournalist, grew up feeling marginalized by their mother. Anya saw her daughters as merely incidental to her grateful love for their father Evan, who rescued her from a German prison camp. The girls know neither their mother’s true age, nor the answers to several other mysteries: her color-blindness, her habit of hoarding food despite the family’s prosperity and the significance of her “winter garden” with its odd Cyrillic-inscribed columns. The only thawing in Anya’s mien occurs when she relates a fairy tale about a peasant girl who meets a prince and their struggles to live happily ever after during the reign of a tyrannical Black Knight. After Evan dies, the family comes unraveled: Anya shows signs of dementia; Nina and Meredith feud over whether to move Mom from her beloved dacha-style home, named Belye Nochi after the summer “white nights” of her native Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Anya, now elderly but of preternaturally youthful appearance—her white hair has been that way as long as the girls can remember—keeps babbling about leather belts boiled for soup, furniture broken up for firewood and other oddities. Prompted by her daughters’ snooping and a few vodka-driven dinners, she grudgingly divulges her story. She is not Anya, but Vera, sole survivor of a Russian family; her father, grandmother, mother, sister, husband and two children were all lost either to Stalin’s terror or during the German army’s siege of Leningrad. Anya’s chronicle of the 900-day siege, during which more than half a million civilians perished from hunger and cold, imparts new gravitas to the novel, easily overwhelming her daughters’ more conventional “issues.” The effect, however, is all but vitiated by a manipulative and contrived ending.
Bestselling Hannah (True Colors, 2009, etc.) sabotages a worthy effort with an overly neat resolution.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-36412-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
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