Gross gets many emotional details about marriage and the intensity of mother-love right, but she milks her trendy issues to...
Gross (Getting Out, 2002, etc.) pits working mother versus stay-at-home mother in yet another fiction about women’s ambivalent struggle to combine work and family.
Amanda and her lawyer husband Aaron move from Manhattan to the New Jersey suburbs shortly before their baby Malena is born. When a tree falls on their house during a storm, their neighbor Thea and her rock-solid husband Caius invite them to stay in their house. Grateful for Thea’s generous hospitality, Amanda is intimidated by her graceful competence as a housewife and mother. Thea, who has never worked while raising her three children, is jealous and resentful of Amanda for having a new infant to love. Although Amanda senses Thea’s disapproval of her decision to return to work as a book editor, desperation drives Amanda to hire Thea as a babysitter. The women distrust each other yet feel drawn toward friendship. One Friday after a near disaster, they share a kiss of affectionate relief that is vaguely sexual. The following Monday, Thea, uncomfortable with the kiss and afraid she’s growing overly attached to Malena, quits as babysitter. The women’s friendship sours. When dead animals start appearing on Thea’s doorstep, she suspects and eventually accuses Amanda. Thea clings to her hostility even after Amanda and Aaron rescue Thea’s daughter Carra, who has seriously injured herself while trespassing in their yard. Finally, an Outward Bound trip for Thea, as well as Aaron’s close call on 9/11, give Thea and Amanda a sense of perspective. The narration moves back and forth between the two women. Neither recognizes the other’s insecurity, each is jealous of the other, but the balance of sympathy is weighted toward neurotic Jewish Amanda, who has a sense of humor about her shortcomings that uptight Episcopalian Thea lacks.
Gross gets many emotional details about marriage and the intensity of mother-love right, but she milks her trendy issues to didactic death.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-35292-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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