Any hope of profundity is further undermined by a maudlin ending worthy of a Hugh Grant movie.
A portrait painter becomes enmeshed in her subjects’ secrets and lies.
Ella, who at 35 has secured her niche as London portraitist to the wealthy and titled, has a knack for exposing the cloaked emotions of the people she paints. As the novel begins, she’s just received an e-mail from her once-revered father, John, who left Ella and her ballerina mother, Sue, 30 years ago for another woman. She’s debating whether to see John when her half-sister Chloe, finally recovering from an affair with a married man, wins a portrait from Ella at a charity auction. Ella is thus assigned to paint Chloe’s charismatic fiancé, Nate, an American employed by a London private-equity firm. At first Ella despises Nate—based on an overheard cell-phone call, she assumes he’s two-timing Chloe—but as he sits for her, she finds herself, to her dismay, falling for him brushstroke by brushstroke. As she helps Sue plan the myriad details of Chloe’s upcoming wedding extravaganza, her mother confesses that not only was John unfaithful, he had a child with the other woman. As she ponders this revelation of a sister she never knew she had, Ella is beset by other dilemmas. One of her subjects, a Frenchwoman, is not only cynical about the 40th birthday gala her much older husband is planning for her, but squeamish about being captured on canvas—could it be because she is having an affair? Another, an M.P. up for re-election, may have been the hit-and-run driver who killed Grace, a bicyclist whom Ella has been commissioned to memorialize in a posthumous painting from photographs. Wolff builds tension by skillfully balancing multiple plotlines of betrayal, deception and remorse. Although Ella’s close scrutiny of her subjects elucidates their characters, her own personality, thanks perhaps to her role as voyeur, remains opaque—not a winning trait in a protagonist.
Any hope of profundity is further undermined by a maudlin ending worthy of a Hugh Grant movie.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-553-80784-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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