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MY FATHER HAD A DAUGHTER

Name: MY FATHER HAD A DAUGHTER
Author: Grace Tiffany
ISBN: 0-425-19003-X

JUDITH SHAKESPEARE’S TALE

by Grace Tiffany ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 6, 2003

Engaging enough to whet the appetite of those readers unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s family life and times, but there’s no...

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Shakespeare is hot, a fact shown not long ago by the success of Shakespeare In Love. Now Tiffany debuts with a strange little fantasy spotlighting the Bard’s daughter Judith.

Shakespeare had three children by Anne Hathaway: first Susanna, then the twins Judith and Hamnet, Hamnet dying, from unknown causes, while a child. Author Tiffany, English professor and Shakespearean specialist, has invented a drowning for him to launch her tale. The boy is Judith’s ideal playmate in their wildly imaginative games, while in the background is their volatile mother, chafing at William’s long absences in London, which so distress Hamnet that Judith casts a spell to bring her father home. The spell calls for dunking themselves in the Avon, which causes Hamnet’s accidental drowning. Judith is overwhelmed by guilt, then by rage at her father after finding a discarded scroll of Twelfth Night. She concludes he’s exploiting Hamnet’s death: and this calls for his exposure, and for her public atonement. So, at 14, Judith steals away to London. Still flat-chested, she changes into boy’s clothes, finds a job at a tavern, and lands a bit part with her father’s company. All this happens with a dreamlike ease, a fast pace and a jaunty tone helping mask the many improbabilities. When the older boy actor Nathan Field threatens to expose her as a girl, she buys his silence by sacrificing her virginity, all in a day’s work for this bold lass. She then tricks Nathan out of the part of Viola and has her moment of glory at the Globe before her father recognizes her and returns her to Stratford. The great adventure of Judith’s life now over, the story runs out of steam: Its final third covers her quiet life back home and marriage, years later, to a local vintner.

Engaging enough to whet the appetite of those readers unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s family life and times, but there’s no meat here for the more sophisticated.

Pub Date: May 6, 2003

ISBN: 0-425-19003-X

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Berkley

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2004

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.