Less than fully achieved, but a book of considerable strength.
The complex relationship of two sisters who grow up, then apart, on an Oklahoma farm during the 1930s is grittily etched in the Virginian author’s second novel (after The River Beyond the World, 1996).
It’s essentially two distinct books that fit together without much success. In the first, partially crippled Maxine “Mackie” Spoon endures her disability and her quick-tempered sister Etta’s eccentric misbehavior, until it becomes clear that Etta will steal from her the affections of Audie Kipp, the orphaned Indian youth hired to help their widowed father, McHenry, keep his farm operating despite years’ worth of damaging dust storms. Secrets split the family apart: the accident that caused their mother’s death, the identity of the father of Etta’s baby, the guilt borne by McHenry for the death of his brother many years earlier and the hidden truth about Mackie’s paternity. The narrative then concentrates on Mackie’s odyssey away from her kin, her disappointed love for a taciturn married man and the independence with which she learns to shield herself from the claims of numerous relationships. “Book Two” subsequently employs several (only gradually identified) observers and narrators whose encounters with the primary characters disclose what has happened to the Spoon girls and the stoical Audie in the decades following their separation. Peery writes beautifully about the intricate demands of farm life and the arduous process of adapting to a harsh and unpredictable climate, and her characters have the imposing solidity of figures painstakingly carved from unyielding substance. At its best, the novel recalls Josephine Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize–winner Now in November, the bleakly lyrical fiction of Elizabeth Madox Roberts and, in passing, Wuthering Heights. But the puzzle presented by its patchwork second half diffuses tension built up earlier, and even readers absorbed in its particulars may have trouble staying its gnarled course.
Less than fully achieved, but a book of considerable strength.Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-25263-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Earnestly done, and correctly, but information trumps drama, and the heart is left out.
A carefully researched little novel, Otsuka’s first, about the US internment of Japanese citizens during WWII that’s perfect down to the tiniest detail but doesn’t stir the heart.
Shortly after the war begins, the father of an unnamed Japanese family of four in Berkeley, California, is taken from his home—not even given time to dress—and held for questioning. His wife and two children won’t see him until after war’s end four years later, when he’ll have been transformed into a suddenly very old man, afraid, broken, and unwilling to speak even a word about what happened to him. Meanwhile, from the spring of 1942 until the autumn after the armistice, the mother, age 42, with her son and daughter of 8 and 11, respectively, will be held in camps in high-desert Utah, treeless and windswept, where they’ll live in rows of wooden barracks offering little privacy, few amenities, and causing them to suffer—the mother especially—greater and greater difficulty in hanging on to any sense of hope or normality. The characters are denied even first names, perhaps as a way of giving them universality, but the device does nothing to counteract the reader’s ongoing difficulty in entering into them. Details abound—book titles, contemporary references (the Dionne quints, sugar rationing), keepsakes the children take to the camp (a watch, a blue stone), euthanizing the family dog the night before leaving for the camps—but still the narrative remains stubbornly at the surface, almost like an informational flow, causing the reader duly to acknowledge these many wrongs done to this unjustly uprooted and now appallingly deprived American family—but never finding a way to go deeper, to a place where the attention will be held rigid and the heart seized.
Earnestly done, and correctly, but information trumps drama, and the heart is left out.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41429-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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