Compassionate coming-of-age novel replete with colorful Southern characters and charm.
In this debut work of fiction, Grace Stevens, a promising piano player from a struggling family, goes on a journey of love and loss before making her way back home to the foothills of east Tennessee.
Growing up in the 1960s in Grantville, a small mill town in Tennessee, Grace loves to play the piano, thumping out tunes by ear. Her mother, Arlene, her aunt Doris and her beloved Grammie decide that Grace must get piano lessons from the affluent widow, former Richmond belle and one-time classical pianist who lives in a gracious mansion in the rich part of town. Grace’s father, Hoyt, objects to this idea, preferring to spend cash on a rifle or booze, so the women scrape together the money in secret. While initially crushed by her teacher’s pronouncement that she must unlearn all her bad habits and begin anew, Grace becomes a diligent student, earning the admiration and patronage of “Miss Bertie” and eventually a music scholarship to attend Vanderbilt University in Nashville. At college, Grace forges an unlikely friendship with her privileged roommate, expands her horizons as a pianist for hire, and engages in a romance that further pushes her into her family’s legacy of alcohol abuse. By novel’s end, Grace reconnects to her talent, treasures the network of support she’s blessed with and builds a new life for herself back in Grantville. Debut author Walker infuses a rich Southern flavor into what is certainly a heartfelt tale. First-person narrator Grace is in the tradition of such wise-child observers as Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and the eponymous heroine in Kaye Gibbons’ Ellen Foster (1987). While her derailment from her music studies is somewhat disappointing, and the cause for it rather clichéd, Grace’s realization of what’s really important, and her appreciation of the roles that others have played in her life, is truly touching and transcendent. Unlike many authors working in the genre, Walker also conveys nuanced sympathy for her male characters beside an emphasis on sustaining sisterhood.
Compassionate coming-of-age novel replete with colorful Southern characters and charm.Pub Date: March 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615954325
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Frances Walker
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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