Uneven but spottily entertaining.
A debut tragicomic romance about a woman’s dark past catching up to her.
Glamorous Los Angeles lounge singer Davie Jones grew up Davidia Jones in a poor, abusive, fatherless family in small-town Mississippi. Beaten into literal silence by her prostitute mother, Davie becomes the invisible girl. When the rich Farell family comes to town, Davie falls in love with the Farell heir, James. When his sister, the cartoonishly evil Veronica, finds out, she pulls a prank that proves to be the last straw for Davie, who packs up and runs away. Years later, James and the now successful, charming and vocal Davie cross paths again, and this time, James falls madly in love with her, though the author seems better at describing their steamy sex life than their emotional connection. Veronica reappears and threatens the careful, delicate façade Davie has built for herself since high school. The more frivolous scenes are offset by some surprisingly sober moments. The verbal and physical abuse from Davie’s mother and the school bullying Davie is subjected to are potent and well rendered. Equally touching are the meaningful relationships she forms in L.A. with a truck driver-turned-savior Mama Jones and the gruff nightclub owner, Nicky—easily the most enjoyable member of the cast of characters. Davie and the story take their inspiration from the classic ’80s hit Sixteen Candles, but sometimes the parallels go too far. The narrative would have more impact if it didn’t dismiss every disturbing moment with a scene straight out of a romantic comedy. The love object, James, is as thick as cardboard and twice as boring. Davie is by turns heroic and psychotic, but the simple fact that she is a survivor is enough to keep readers rooting for her, though sometimes only barely. The pacing is steady and having the narrative jump back in time once or twice keeps the plot moving and the fairly shocking revelations coming.
Uneven but spottily entertaining.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-195784-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
Morrison, in her sixth novel, enters 1926 Harlem, a new black world then ("safe from fays [whites] and the things they think up"), and moves into a love story—with a love that could clear a space from the past, give a life or take one. At 50, Joe Trace—good-looking, faithful to wife Violet, also from Virginia poortimes—suddenly tripped into a passionate affair with Dorcas, 18: "one of those deep-down spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going." Then Violet went to Dorcas's funeral and cut her dead face. But before Joe met Dorcas, and before her death and before Violet, in her torn coat, scoured the neighborhood looking for reasons, looking for her own truer identity, images of the past burned within all three: Violet's mother, tipped out of her chair by the men who took everything away, and her death in a well; for Joe, the hand of the "wild" woman, his mother, that never really found his. And all of the child Dorcas's dolls burned up with her mother and her childhood. Truly, the new music of Harlem—from clicks and taps of pleasure to the thud of betrayed marching black veterans with their frozen faces—"had a complicated anger in it." Were Joe and Violet substitutes for each other, for a need known and unmet? At the close, a new link is forged between them with another Dorcas. One of Morrison's richest novels yet, with its weave of city voices, tough and tender, public and private, and a flight of images that sweep up the world in a heartbeat: the narrator (never identified) contemplates airships in a city sky as they "swim below cloud foam...like watching a private dream....That was what [Dorcas's] hunger was like: mesmerizing, directed, floating like a public secret." In all, a lovely novel—lyrical, searching, and touching.
Pub Date: April 21, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-41167-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
From the Toronto-based Mistry (Such a Long Journey, 1991), a splendid tale of contemporary India that, in chronicling the sufferings of outcasts and innocents trying to survive in the ``State of Internal Emergency'' of the 1970s, grapples with the great question of how to live in the face of death and despair. Though Mistry is too fine a writer to indulge in polemics, this second novel is also a quietly passionate indictment of a corrupt and ineluctably cruel society. India under Indira Gandhi has become a country ruled by thugs who maim and kill for money and power. The four protagonists (all victims of the times) are: Dina, 40-ish, poor and widowed after only three years of marriage; Maneck, the son of an old school friend of Dina's; and two tailors, Ishvar and his nephew Om, members of the Untouchable caste. For a few months, this unlikely quartet share a tranquil happiness in a nameless city—a city of squalid streets teeming with beggars, where politicians, in the name of progress, abuse the poor and the powerless. Dina, whose dreams of attending college ended when her father died, is now trying to support herself with seamstress work; Maneck, a tenderhearted boy, has been sent to college because the family business is failing; and the two tailors find work with Dina. Though the four survive encounters with various thugs and are saved from disaster by a quirky character known as the Beggarmaster, the times are not propitious for happiness. On a visit back home, Om and Ishvar are forcibly sterilized; Maneck, devastated by the murder of an activist classmate, goes abroad. But Dina and the tailors, who have learned ``to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair,'' keep going. A sweeping story, in a thoroughly Indian setting, that combines Dickens's vivid sympathy for the poor with Solzhenitsyn's controlled outrage, celebrating both the resilience of the human spirit and the searing heartbreak of failed dreams.
Pub Date: April 25, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-44608-7
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
