More fine work from one of popular fiction’s most talented practitioners.
In the sweltering fall of 1876, a San Francisco prostitute tracks a killer and searches for her stolen baby.
Donoghue returns here to the historical fiction genre in which she first made her international mark (Slammerkin, 2000, etc.), but she’s blended in the suspense craft she acquired writing her contemporary mega-seller Room (2010). Who fired the shotgun blasts that blew away Jenny Bonnet while her friend Blanche bent down to take off her boots? Blanche believes it was her lover Arthur or his sidekick, Ernest, who have been living on her earnings as a high-priced erotic dancer/whore. They weren’t happy when Jenny goaded Blanche into retrieving her 1-year-old son, P’tit, from the ghastly holding pen for unwanted children where Arthur dumped him while Blanche was ill. And Jenny is killed while Blanche is hiding out in the countryside with her after an ugly scene with Arthur and Ernest that led Blanche to flee their apartment without P’tit. The men blame Jenny for Blanche’s newfound, unwelcome independence, but there are plenty of other people in San Francisco who dislike the defiant, cross-dressing frog-catcher, who presents herself as an untamed free spirit. There’s far more to Jenny’s story, we learn, as Donoghue cuts between Blanche’s hunt for her son in mid-September and the events of August, when her collision with bicycle-riding Jenny led to their unlikely friendship. By the time the murderer is revealed, we understand why Jenny knows so much about abandoned children, and we’ve seen how Blanche has been changed by her hesitant commitment to motherhood. (Some of the book’s funniest, most touching moments depict her early struggles to care for “this terrible visitor,” her baby.) Donoghue’s vivid rendering of Gilded Age San Francisco is notable for her atmospheric use of popular songs and slang in Blanche’s native French, but the book’s emotional punch comes from its portrait of a woman growing into self-respect as she takes responsibility for the infant life she’s created.
More fine work from one of popular fiction’s most talented practitioners.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-316-32468-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
PROFILES
A high-thread-count sheet of jokes swathing a plot as slender as its eating-challenged narrator.
A Hollywood divorce with all the trimmings: luxury real estate, lawyers, TMZ, plastic surgery, an Oscar, and a night in jail.
It begins at the narrator’s 48th birthday party, where her A-list movie star husband, Trevor, toasts her…work ethic. “My fertility is on its last heaving throes, my eggs scrambled and crapping out, waving the white maxi pad. All that’s left for me is flushing and sweat. Soon, I will be all dried out, a human tumbleweed, rolling along Sunset Boulevard to guzzle martinis at the Polo Lounge,” she says. Rushing along in a torrent of inner monologue, snappy dialogue, puns, memes, and wisecracks, the narrator of Levangie’s (Seven Deadlies, 2013, etc.) latest goes from the birthday celebration to a book party with signature cocktails called “Tres Deadlies” and “Deadlies on Arrival”—suggesting that the author, a former Hollywood wife herself, knows whereof she speaks. When the narrator gets home, she finds the code to the gate of her “mid-century California ranch-style estate in the famed Palisades Riviera” has been changed. After she climbs over, the guard, ordered to keep her out, tasers her. “I’m putting this marriage in turnaround,” announces the extremely self-absorbed Trevor. “You know, like when I had that cartel project I was really in love with but then we couldn’t get Guillermo to direct and then I kind of fell out of love and I fired everybody?” The narrator digs in her heels—after all, she needs a place to raise her daughter, Pep, hide her ex-con sister, Fin, and entertain her book club, currently reading “a multigenerational family saga set in the Burmese mountains in the winter of 1806, written by a queer-leaning Bangladeshi paraplegic.” This means war.
A high-thread-count sheet of jokes swathing a plot as slender as its eating-challenged narrator.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-16681-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Love, grief, and forgiveness illuminate this compelling summer read.
Throughout college, Evvie, Maggie, and Topher were the best of friends. But time and the mistakes that come with simply being human may strain their love to the breaking point.
The daughter of a hardworking Jamaican immigrant and an abusive American banker, Evvie Williams grew up a child actor, ironically starring as an adorable daughter in The Perfect Family. That’s when her struggles with weight began, as her mother put her on her first diet at age 7. After her father hit her mother one too many times, she and her mother pulled up stakes and moved to London. Years of yo-yo dieting later, she heads off to college, where she meets Maggie Hallwell, the redheaded only daughter in a raucous and somewhat posh family from Sussex. They discover Topher, the son of the impossibly glamorous Joan Winthrop, while shopping for dorm furniture. Immediately smitten with each other, the three are inseparable, even rooming together for the last years of college. Of course, there’s also Evil Ben, so dubbed because he never smiled at Evvie, even when she began bartending at the same local pub. Nonetheless, Maggie falls head over heels in love with Ben at first sight. Green (The Sunshine Sisters, 2017, etc.) masterfully switches from one character's perspective to another's, devastatingly sketching their successes, showing how they're riddled with pain, and setting them on a collision course. Maggie eventually marries her beloved Ben, yet their seemingly perfect marriage is fractured by a lack of children and Ben’s catastrophic drinking, which Maggie desperately tries to keep secret. Topher embarks on a successful acting career and finds love. Yet he’s also struggling with a secret about his past. Evvie has not only lived a glamorous life as a supermodel, but also raised her son, Jack. And she, too, hides a few secrets. Thirty years later, the friends reunite, but one of their secrets threatens to destroy everything.
Love, grief, and forgiveness illuminate this compelling summer read.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-58334-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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