Heavy with literary allusions and overt symbolism, Liz’s ruminations make for a ponderously slow if finely tuned read.
In Canadian Urquhart’s latest (A Map of Glass, 2006, etc.), a grown woman returns to the abandoned family farm where she experienced her happiest and most emotionally troubling moments.
A year after her cousin Mandy’s death while serving in the military in Afghanistan, 40-ish Liz returns to the Ontario farm once owned by Mandy’s father, Liz’s maternal uncle Stanley, until he disappeared 20 years ago. The abandoned orchards Stanley once tended with the help of migrant farm labor from Mexico have gone to seed and decay. Now a scientist, Liz has come back to the area to study the annual migration of monarch butterflies between Mexico and this Canadian edge of Lake Erie. Liz talks some about her butterfly study, but mostly, her thoughts meander over her family’s history, particularly her own childhood migration to the farm each summer from a lonely existence with her widowed mother, Stanley’s sister, in Toronto. Stanley was charismatic yet vulnerable and slightly mysterious; his moods controlled the family. The Mexicans who worked the orchards every summer stayed mostly apart, but Stanley tried to get his two sons as well as Mandy and Liz to include one Mexican child, Theo, in their play so he could learn English. The boys were cruel to Theo, Mandy was oblivious, but Liz bonded with him. Not only were they both outsiders, but they both were being raised by single mothers—Theo’s mother, Delores, supervised the other migrant workers. Although Liz knew little about Theo’s winter life in Mexico, by adolescence, romantic sparks developed between the two. Then an ugly tragedy destroyed what had been a kind of Eden for everyone. As Liz reveals that tragedy and its aftermath in bits and pieces, she also ponders Mandy’s more recent death and the secret affair Mandy was carrying on with a high-ranking officer. While Liz’s own adulthood remains mostly a blank, Urquhart sensitively portrays her limited perceptions in childhood.
Heavy with literary allusions and overt symbolism, Liz’s ruminations make for a ponderously slow if finely tuned read.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62365-016-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Mobius
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
Waxman has created a thoroughly engaging character in this bookish, contemplative, set-in-her-ways woman. Be prepared to...
Introverted Nina Hill, the only child of a single mother, is pulled—both kicking and screaming and passive-aggressively resisting—into a new family and a new relationship.
Nina likes “pinning things down,” being prepared in advance, and making a daily schedule. After working in the bookstore, she goes home to her cat, Phil, where she reads and bones up for her next trivia contest. Her static, well-regulated life is turned upside down when a lawyer contacts her with news about her father, though her mother had always claimed not to know who he was. Turns out he was wealthy, and he's left her something in his will. At the lawyer’s office, she meets the rest of the family, her half-aunts, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, some welcoming and others decidedly not. Nina wants no part of this family. Who cares what her father might have left her? No thanks! And then another intrusion appears in the form of a handsome man, captain of a rival trivia team. He’s too showy for Nina, and besides, he knows all the sports category answers, so she pegs him as a nonreader, a big turnoff. Nina wants only to be left alone. But Nina is not all rules and solitude. She has a spark, an imagination, and a sense of humor that make you want to sit with her and observe people over a cappuccino and pastry...while making wisecracks. She of course grows and opens her life to new experiences—her new family and, maybe, the trivia guy. Waxman (Other People's Houses, 2018, etc.) skillfully shows Nina's changing mindset in the hilarious schedules, complete with meal plans and shopping lists, she makes each day. If you love writing plans and sticking to them, you’ll love Nina Hill. If you roll your eyes at people who make daily schedules, you’ll love Nina Hill, too.
Waxman has created a thoroughly engaging character in this bookish, contemplative, set-in-her-ways woman. Be prepared to chuckle.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-451-49187-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A lovely prose poem that gives a bitter history lesson.
Otsuka, whose first novel (When the Emperor Was Divine, 2003) focused on one specific Japanese-American family’s plight during and after internment, takes the broad view in this novella-length consideration of Japanese mail-order brides making a life for themselves in America in the decades before World War II.
There are no central characters. A first-person-plural chorus narrates the women’s experiences from their departure from Japan until they are removed from their homes and shipped to the camps, at which point the narration is taken over by clueless whites. Rather than following an individual story, Otsuka lists experience after experience, piling name upon name. Voyaging across the Pacific to California, the women’s emotions range from fear to excitement, but most, even those leaving behind secret lovers, are hopeful. Reality sets in when they meet their husbands, who are seldom the men they seemed from their letters and photographs. And the men’s reactions to their new wives vary as much as the women’s. Some are loving, some abusive. For all their differences, whether farm workers, laundrymen, gardeners or struggling entrepreneurs, they share a common outsider status. Soon the majority of women who stay married—some die or run off or are abandoned—are working alongside their husbands. They begin to have babies and find themselves raising children who speak English and consider themselves American. And the women have become entrenched; some even have relationships with the whites around them; many are financially comfortable. But with the arrival of the war against Japan come rumors. Japanese and white Americans look at each other differently. Loyalty is questioned. Anti-Japanese laws are passed. And the Japanese themselves no longer know whom to trust as more and more of them disappear each day. Once they are truly gone, off to the camps, the whites feel a mix of guilt and relief, then begin to forget the Japanese who had been their neighbors.
A lovely prose poem that gives a bitter history lesson.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-70000-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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