Uproarious, sharp, and outrageously funny joyride with plenty of octane, though it doesn’t really go anywhere in the end.
An award-winning Icelandic novelist makes his English-language debut with a kind of Arctic Bright Lights, Big City, following the nocturnal misadventures of an overgrown baby who refuses to grow up.
As depicted here, the better part of Iceland’s populace are either writers or drunks. Our antihero Hlynur Bjorn drinks a fair amount every night himself and is always working Shakespearean quotes into his conversation. Thirty-three-year-old Hlynur still lives with his mother and is happily unemployed. He usually gets up shortly before Mom comes home from work, browses the bookstores, and spends the evenings in Reykjavik nightclubs with his pals Throstur and Guildy. Most nights Hlynur finds someone to have sex with, but he doesn’t have a steady girlfriend and is in no rush to find one. Iceland is a pretty broadminded place, sexually speaking (when Hlynur’s lesbian mother came out of the closet all he had to say was “cool”), so it’s easy not to commit. But several unexpected events complicate this happy routine. First, Hlynur falls for Mom’s girlfriend Lolla. Second, a woman Hlynur slept with a couple of times turns up pregnant with his child and decides to have the baby. Third, Guildy is diagnosed with AIDS. And fourth (this is a little while later), Lolla turns out to be pregnant by Hlynur as well. There are a lot of additional minor crises (e.g., Hlynur’s drunkard father falls off the wagon), but they go by the wayside once everyone starts getting pregnant. Hlynur tries his best to keep to his schedule of books, booze, porn, and sex, but suddenly he finds himself faced with emotional crises of a magnitude for which he is wholly unprepared. Is he actually going to get serious and decide what he wants from life? We all have to, sooner or later—even in Iceland.
Uproarious, sharp, and outrageously funny joyride with plenty of octane, though it doesn’t really go anywhere in the end.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-2514-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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