Packs a punch on many levels: personal, political, and even mythic.
The story of a quest of sorts, as a high school student in Chávez's Venezuela tries to make sense of love and life—and also tries desperately to leave a country for which she has no affection.
In this deftly and idiomatically translated novel, Eugenia Blanc has enrolled in a special course to complete her high school education, but she finds it boring and irrelevant, especially because her one desire is to locate Laurent Blanc, her paternal grandfather, who's “retreat[ed] to the Andes”; she thinks his French origin might give her the possibility of moving to France and thus away from her estranged parents, her brother’s suicide, and Venezuela’s social and political problems. Luis Tévez, a charismatic (and gorgeous) fellow student, plans to visit a friend and offers to take her on this quest, and along the way they wind up stealing 24 bottles of Johnny Walker Blue Label, a drink that pervades the narrative, serving as a social lubricant, an excuse to get drunk or have sex, a sacrament for a wedding, and even a liquid to refill an empty radiator. They inadvertently take along another passenger, Vadier Hernández, whose drugged and drunken irreverence both expresses and disguises his joie de vivre. Eugenia becomes somewhat obsessed with Luis, and she finds herself extremely attracted to him despite his severe mood swings. Eugenia’s quest for her grandfather eventually becomes less important to her when she recovers a long letter from her estranged father that helps her make some sense of her life. Several days after her return from her journey, she as well as the reader receives a shock regarding Luis. Eventually, in an epilogue, we learn of the importance of the intoxicating memories of that indelible journey she took as a teenager.
Packs a punch on many levels: personal, political, and even mythic.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-885983-57-2
Page Count: 239
Publisher: Turtle Point
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of...
Hoover’s (November 9, 2015, etc.) latest tackles the difficult subject of domestic violence with romantic tenderness and emotional heft.
At first glance, the couple is edgy but cute: Lily Bloom runs a flower shop for people who hate flowers; Ryle Kincaid is a surgeon who says he never wants to get married or have kids. They meet on a rooftop in Boston on the night Ryle loses a patient and Lily attends her abusive father’s funeral. The provocative opening takes a dark turn when Lily receives a warning about Ryle’s intentions from his sister, who becomes Lily’s employee and close friend. Lily swears she’ll never end up in another abusive home, but when Ryle starts to show all the same warning signs that her mother ignored, Lily learns just how hard it is to say goodbye. When Ryle is not in the throes of a jealous rage, his redeeming qualities return, and Lily can justify his behavior: “I think we needed what happened on the stairwell to happen so that I would know his past and we’d be able to work on it together,” she tells herself. Lily marries Ryle hoping the good will outweigh the bad, and the mother-daughter dynamics evolve beautifully as Lily reflects on her childhood with fresh eyes. Diary entries fancifully addressed to TV host Ellen DeGeneres serve as flashbacks to Lily’s teenage years, when she met her first love, Atlas Corrigan, a homeless boy she found squatting in a neighbor’s house. When Atlas turns up in Boston, now a successful chef, he begs Lily to leave Ryle. Despite the better option right in front of her, an unexpected complication forces Lily to cut ties with Atlas, confront Ryle, and try to end the cycle of abuse before it’s too late. The relationships are portrayed with compassion and honesty, and the author’s note at the end that explains Hoover’s personal connection to the subject matter is a must-read.
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of the survivors.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1036-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy (The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend—the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1986
ISBN: 0553381547
Page Count: 686
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
SEEN & HEARD
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