Sendker can be a mesmerizing storyteller, but his high quotient of romantic spiritualism is hard for even the mildly...
In the German novelist Sendker’s sequel to The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (2012), a Manhattan attorney returns to Burma 10 years after her first visit for further lessons in love.
When she was 28, intellectual property lawyer Julia traveled to Burma, where she learned of her Burmese father’s early life and his reunion with the love of his life, whom he’d left behind before moving to America and marrying Julia’s American mother. While there, she became close to the saintly half brother, U Ba, she never knew existed. Since her return to New York, she has meant to return to Burma but never got around to it. Now, shortly after breaking up with her boyfriend and receiving a letter from U Ba, Julia begins to hear a voice asking her questions. A psychiatrist prescribes drugs to quell the voice. Instead, she visits a Buddhist center, where a Burmese monk clarifies that another woman’s soul is trapped inside Julia’s body. Soon, Julia is winging her way to Burma, where she quickly finds U Ba, who takes her to visit Khin Khin, an elderly woman who tells the story of her dead half sister, Nu Nu, whose voice haunts Julia. (In his first novel, Sendker used the similar technique of framing one story inside another.) Nu Nu’s crisis was that she loved her first son more than her second. The second son, Thar Thar, grew up aware he was unwanted by his mother. Nevertheless, after his loving father’s early death, Thar Thar cared well for his mother and brother, but when Burmese soldiers forced Nu Nu to make a “Sophie’s choice,” she didn’t hesitate in deciding to save her favorite. So, 12-year-old Thar Thar was forced into the army. As Julia and U Bar discover what became of Thar Thar, Julia learns about the power of love and realizes where her own heart truly belongs.
Sendker can be a mesmerizing storyteller, but his high quotient of romantic spiritualism is hard for even the mildly skeptical to take seriously.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59051-640-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Starts out promising but never quite gets out of first gear.
A laconic auto-body shop owner hopes to woo a longtime crush, but he has to overcome his past trauma to convince her they belong together.
Rena Jackson has started her own hair salon in Seattle and wants her personal life to rev up, too, but she has almost given up on Axel Heller’s making a move. Though she finds the German transplant attractive, she worries that he is commitment-phobic and not ready for true intimacy. With both their upbringings shadowing them (his involves domestic violence and hers a single mother who has looked for love too often), can two strong, wary people become vulnerable to love? Harte (Delivered With a Kiss, 2019, etc.) provides readers with passages about Axel’s painful memories and his fear of being a physical threat to a woman. This is a useful counter to some novels’ tendency to romanticize the threat of male power. But the limited, alternating perspective leaves Rena in the dark for much longer than the reader, with the result that her complaints about Axel’s attachment style edge her into unlikable territory. The novel is threaded together by Axel's awkward (albeit funny) attempts to court Rena with gifts and other gestures but doesn't allow her similar space to show her personality and get us to root for the couple. The quick references to, and scenes with, numerous peripheral characters bog down the romance arc further. The handling of the white supremacists who have been threatening Rena, who's African American, is a broad-stroke attempt to acknowledge racism but lacks nuance, as does a scene involving homophobia. While the novel’s title and cover allude to recent successes like The Kiss Quotient and The Hating Game, it lacks the former’s thematic firm-footedness and the latter’s tonal mastery of comedy and emotion.
Starts out promising but never quite gets out of first gear.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4926-9698-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
Detectives, doctors, and dastardly scoundrels abound in this fascinating historical novel.
Luring women with the false promise of a safe, albeit illegal, abortion, a serial killer is on the loose in 1880s New York City.
In this sequel to The Gilded Hour (2015), Donati returns to a time when female doctors were viewed with surprise if not outright hostility. Cousins Anna and Sophie Savard have earned their professional medical training, both turning to practice primarily on women. Grieving the recent death of her attorney husband, Cap, from tuberculosis, Sophie plans to use her inheritance to establish scholarships and a welcoming home for women pursuing medical studies. Happily married to Jack Mezzanotte, a detective investigating the killings with his partner, Oscar Maroney, Anna is a highly accomplished surgeon, but they have just lost custody of the children they were fostering, children the church wants raised by Catholics. The sprawling Savard family blends multiple ethnicities, including Italian, Mohawk, and African American, and Donati crafts strong female characters who draw upon the wisdom of their ancestors to transcend the slings and arrows of petty racism and sexism. She juxtaposes these women, thriving on the energies of the zeitgeist advancing women’s rights, with the villains, who sink into the muck of dubious morality crusades, such as the anti-contraception and anti-abortion campaigns of Anthony Comstock and the xenophobic orphanage system run by the Roman Catholic Church. Through Sophie’s and Anna’s work, Donati sketches in the historical backdrop of reproductive challenges in late-19th-century America: Women dying in childbirth, women dying to avoid childbirth, women and babies mangled by medical quacks, and children drugged to the point of death just to keep peace in the nursery. The wounds inflicted by the serial killer caused prolonged, severely painful deaths, suggesting not inept but malicious intent. And as the Drs. Savard assist Jack and Oscar in their investigation, another woman goes missing.
Detectives, doctors, and dastardly scoundrels abound in this fascinating historical novel.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-425-27182-7
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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