Shoots out lots of sparks, but nothing ignites. (First printing of 25,000; author tour)
Soveida, the Mexican-American waitress narrating this unruly first novel, has such an enchanting voice and so willingly reveals all that it takes a while to catch on that she is never going to get to the point.
It's a shame, too, because Chavez (The Last of the Menu Girls, not reviewed) has created a wonderfully vibrant character whose little stories of life in the small New Mexico town of Agua Oscura are full of imaginative detail. As a religious young woman Soveida is fascinated by Saint Maria Goretti, who was raped and then killed. Later she learns about sex from an erotic-movie preview mistakenly shown to her elementary school class when they go to see The Song of Bernadette. At 15, Soveida begins working as a bus girl at a restaurant, where she eventually advances to waiting tables and starts writing ``The Book of Service,'' a collection of advice for young women thinly disguised as a waitressing guide. (The chapter on hands instructs servers not to wear rings because they will get dirty: ``Especially wedding, engagement, or friendship. They will only go down the drain sooner or later, and cause some kind of chafing.'') She herself marries twice, to a philanderer who leaves her for another woman and to a man afflicted with Peyronie's disease, a blood-vessel disorder that makes sexual excitement painful and intercourse impossible. After the latter's suicide, she takes up with a community-college professor of Chicano Culture and Tradition and Folklore. There are plenty of good ideas buried here: the different kinds of service in women's lives, academic distance from real life, the influence of upbringing. Unfortunately, none of these is presented as a central theme. Adding to the kitchen-sink feeling is the inclusion of documents ranging from Soveida's college papers (including her professor's comments and grades) to letters from former husbands and lovers.
Shoots out lots of sparks, but nothing ignites. (First printing of 25,000; author tour)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-15204-7
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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