From an American-born actress now living in Germany, a first novel that offers wry and refreshingly upbeat reminiscences of life in the single lane—both here and in Berlin. Hostess of a local cable talk show, Breakfasts at Becky's, fortyish Becky Bernstein has just been dumped by yet another inappropriate boyfriend. Now surveying her apartment and her figure (her boyfriend's last words: ``It wouldn't hurt you to lose a few pounds around the hips''), she decides that it may be time to clean up her act. She'll clear out the 20 years of accumulated stuff in her apartment and also lose weight. As she does both, Becky mingles memories of her childhood, youth, and lovers in with a narrative of her present efforts to change. A New Yorker, and the daughter of an intermittently successful salesman father, she's a city girl who loves to museum hop and shop and is unfazed by dirty subways and weirdos. She admits to finding the Germans with their orderliness, respect for authority, and verb-impaired language deeply strange. She had first come to Berlin after college, dragged along in the wake of JÅrgen, an architect she met and fell in love with at the Museum of Modern Art. Once in Berlin, she lived in a leftist commune with JÅrgen and, when their affair ended, moved into the apartment she's occupied since. Between card games with neighbors, meetings with friends, and the celebration attendant on the news that a story of hers has been accepted by Mademoiselle, Becky recalls old friendships and her ebullient family. And while she and her apartment are in the process of shedding their excess, she unexpectedly meets her true love. Recollections that at times seem forced or superfluous, but the Becky who has them is so full of life and energy, so utterly in your face, that much can be forgiven. A lively and entertaining debut.
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55970-381-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
Despite getting a little preachy toward the end, Leary has largely achieved a genuinely funny novel about alcoholism.
A supposedly recovering alcoholic real estate agent tells her not-exactly-trustworthy version of life in her small New England town in this tragicomic novel by Leary (Outtakes from a Marriage, 2008, etc.).
Sixty-year-old Hildy Good, a divorced realtor who has lived all her life in Wendover on the Massachusetts North Shore, proudly points to having an ancestor burned at the stake at the Salem witch trials. In fact, her party trick is to do psychic readings using subtle suggestions and observational skills honed by selling homes. At first, the novel seems to center on Hildy’s insights about her Wendover neighbors, particularly her recent client Rebecca McAllister, a high-strung young woman who has moved into a local mansion with her businessman husband and two adopted sons. Hildy witnesses Rebecca having trouble fitting in with other mothers, visiting the local psychiatrist Peter Newbold, who rents an office above Hildy’s, and winning a local horse show on her expensive new mount. Hildy is acerbically funny and insightful about her neighbors; many, like her, are from old families whose wealth has evaporated. She becomes Rebecca’s confidante about the affair Rebecca is having with Peter, whom Hildy helped baby-sit when he was a lonely child. She helps another family who needs to sell their house to afford schooling for their special needs child. She begins an affair with local handyman Frankie Getchell, with whom she had a torrid romance as a teenager. But Hildy, who has recently spent a stint in rehab and joined AA after an intervention by her grown daughters, is not quite the jolly eccentric she appears. There are those glasses of wine she drinks alone at night, those morning headaches and memory lapses that are increasing in frequency. As both Rebecca’s and Hildy’s lives spin out of control, the tone darkens until it approaches tragedy. Throughout, Hildy is original, irresistibly likable and thoroughly untrustworthy.
Despite getting a little preachy toward the end, Leary has largely achieved a genuinely funny novel about alcoholism.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-01554-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
