Mother-daughter fiction of the best flawed sort where, in the midst of cliché, a genuinely admirable amount of truth shines...
Divorced mother, living in barely-there fashion, gets knocked for a loop when real life comes crashing in.
It’s hard to resist a good tale of emotional thaw about a closed-down soul who’s reawakened to the messy highs and lows of the world outside some carefully structured sanctum. This helps explain the success of Juska’s second outing (after Getting Over Robert Wagner, 2002) but doesn’t completely cover it. Our frozen heroine is Charlotte, on the downhill side of her 40s and divorced for 15 years, living alone in a sterile New Jersey condo with strong-willed daughter Emily, in her early 20s and her mother’s exact opposite. At the start, Charlotte is a nightmarish control freak (with family money to support her) who has little to occupy her days and so spends them in a strict regimen of small tasks: cleaning, running errands, getting manicures, watching Jeopardy every night without fail. Given her neuroses, the departures of Emily (first for college, then for a house in New Hampshire that she shares with her black boyfriend Walter) and the earlier one of husband Joe (for Seattle and a more glamorous wife) leave her free to develop a truly unhealthy set of routines and worries. Juska’s portrait of her, though, is an exacting one and hews, however uncomfortably, close to the truth. Charlotte is every mother who wants nothing more than for her children to move back home, who secretly desires their misery in order to feel needed, and who takes every independent action by those same children as a rebuke of her values. There are neighborhoods full of Charlottes, and Juska’s skill in portraying this one is strong enough that her latest is a powerful success in spite of its tendency to melodrama: an unexpected pregnancy, a crisis over Walter’s race, far too many heart-to-heart discussions.
Mother-daughter fiction of the best flawed sort where, in the midst of cliché, a genuinely admirable amount of truth shines forth.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7434-9350-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Downtown Press/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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