A thick, goopy southern stew from veteran romancer Smith (A Place To Call Home, 1997, etc.), this time involving a touchy pianist, her dreamy sister, and a man fatefully intertwined with them both. Venus Arinelli holds a major grudge against the world: Ever since her left-wing father was accused of a political crime he didn’t commit—and died in prison—Venus has been struggling to escape the scrutiny of the FBI while she and sister Ella eke out a meager existence as nightclub performers. Enter Gib Cameron, ex-Marine and Secret Service agent, who has come to persuade the Arinelli sisters to return to his family’s historic Tennessee inn. Thirty years earlier, Venus’s parents were the first customers at Cameron Hall: They married there, and Venus was conceived on their wedding night. The tattered wedding picture of Venus’s parents is the only remnant of her pampered life as a Louisiana quasi-princess. At first she refuses Gib’s invitation’she despises his superpatriotic air—but then he reveals that he has money for her, left by her father. Once the sisters are in Tennessee, Ella succumbs to the hospitality heaped on them, while Venus keeps a cool distance from the sexy but brooding Gib. Meanwhile, the Camerons have their own troubles: When Gib and his brother Simon went to the sawmill to cut lumber for replacing the chapel floor, an argument led to a hideous accident—Simon was sawed in two by the blade and Gib’s right hand was cruelly maimed. Thus Cameron Hall closed while the family grieved. Cousin Emory now wants to turn it into a resort, while Gib hopes to reopen it as it once was. And all believe that Venus and Ella are the key to the future. . . . A highly improbable storyline, along with an incessant harping on family loyalty, will quickly tire all but romance diehards.
Pub Date: July 13, 1998
ISBN: 0-553-11143-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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