This ludicrous recreation of an early 20th century diary by poor-little-rich-girl Vanderbilt (Never Say Goodbye, 1989, etc.) proves definitively that being famous is in no way equivalent to being talented. Despite her fatuous name, Starr Faithfull was an actual person whose mysterious death in 1931 led the police to discover her diary, which revealed that her cousin Andrew J. Peters, who had served as mayor of Boston, had sexually abused her beginning when she was 11 and he was 45. After the investigation, the journal disappeared. Vanderbilt begins in 1917 on Faithfull's 11th birthday, and the sugary tone that poisons all the entries is immediately apparent. Faithfull soon begins pretentiously calling her journal a ``Memory Book'' and addressing it directly as ``Mem.'' Daily incidents are reported fastidiously, punctuated with plenty of phrases like ``Oh Mem, I can't wait!'' and other fey touches meant to lend little-girl innocence. Faithfull comes across as a simpering brat (``Lucy Edwina and I are the most important girls in school now that Cousin A. is mayor of Boston''), and her repetitiously similar upper-crust tales of Christmas and dancing school all run together. Even the abuse by Peters (whom Faithfull nicknames ``Fou'' because those are his initials in a secret code that she created) is meaningless fluff from this spoiled child's point of view. He plies her with a bottled substance (presumably ether) that Faithfull refers to as ``creamy dreamy'' because of the sensations it causes, and engages her in games of ``make the corn grow.'' Occasionally Vanderbilt appears to recall that this is meant to be a historical novel, so she has Faithfull pen a line like ``A very terrible thing has happened in Russia, Mem. The Bolsheviks executed Czar Nicholas II and all his family.'' In 1924 Faithfull moves from Boston to New York City, where she starts hanging out with a bad crowd, then becomes obsessed with a man. Hers is a sad, perhaps even interesting story that deserved better treatment. Painfully shallow. (Literary Guild selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 24, 1994
ISBN: 0-394-58775-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A laugh-out-loud funny book that will delight longtime Kinsella fans and those looking for a cozy holiday story.
Kinsella’s (I Owe You One, 2019, etc.) much-loved Shopaholic is back—and this time, it’s Christmas.
Becky Brandon is looking forward to spending Christmas with her husband and daughter at her parents’ house, just like always. It’s cozy and warm and, other than her favorite Christmas tradition (shopping), Becky doesn’t have to do much of anything. But then her parents drop a huge surprise—they’re moving to an apartment in the superhip London neighborhood of Shoreditch. Now, instead of Christmas sweaters and carols, they’re into unicycles and avocado toast. Her parents’ transformation into hipsters means that Becky has to host Christmas at her home in Letherby. Becky has no idea how to host a holiday dinner for her entire family and extended network of family friends, but she’s never met a problem she couldn’t shop her way out of. As usual, however, Becky finds herself stuck with a ton of problems. First, she needs to find the perfect gift for her husband, Luke, but in order to get it she just might have to petition an all-male billiards club to accept female members (Becky, of course, doesn’t play billiards). She might be in trouble with the entire country of Norway after creating her own (fictional) version of hygge, “sprygge.” Her environmentally conscious sister wants Becky to decorate a broom instead of a Christmas tree and have a vegan turkey on the table. And then there’s her musician ex-boyfriend who unexpectedly shows up in town with his new girlfriend. With everything on Becky’s plate, will she be able to create the picture-perfect Christmas she dreams of? Becky is still a hardworking, eminently lovable character who just wants to do the right thing, even if she usually screws everything up and finds herself in hilariously awful situations (like, for example, storing 30 pounds of smoked salmon on her front lawn under a duvet).
A laugh-out-loud funny book that will delight longtime Kinsella fans and those looking for a cozy holiday story.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13282-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
A meandering and didactic family saga by Chickasaw poet, novelist, and essayist Hogan (Dwellings, p. 835; Mean Spirit, 1990), a tale that attemptsÖ la Little Big Manto rewrite the history of the American West from a Native American perspective. At 17, Angela Jensen decides that it's time to untangle her family, a process she begins by going hometo a remote village in western Canada called Adam's Rib, a place she no longer even recognizes. Angela looks up Agnes Iron, her great-grandmother, whom she's never met, and is soon introduced to Bush, who looked after Angela's deranged mother, Hannah, and raised Angela herself after Hannah's early death. At first, it is information about her motherstories, accounts, explanationsthat most interests Angela, but eventually she understands that the history of her family is woven tightly into the history of her family's tribe and the bloody strife that has colored their lives ever since the white men came among them: ``For us, hell was cleared forests and killed animals. But for them, hell was this world in all its plenitude.'' The troubles have been carried down to the present day, except that now the threat is comprised not of missionaries and European settlers but of government authorities who want to develop the land out of existence through the construction of a mammoth hydroelectric power plant. As her consciousness is raised, Angela begins to recognize her real identity but desires, and the anger that she labors under throughoutand that finds expression mainly in the crudest caricatures of Western culture and North American history imaginableis relieved by the happy fulfillment of her romantic (rather than political) life: a fairy-tale marriage that seems in this terrain to be even more out-of-place than the dam would have been. Tediously obvious and overwritten; Hogan's characters are so excruciatingly limited to the representation of their cultures that they become little more than allegories, reducing the tale to agitprop.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-81227-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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