A fictional account of a young woman's struggles to become an investigative journalist in the early '70s is informative at its best, plodding and colorless at its worst. In a story covering little more than two years, we witness recent college graduate Catherine Gallagher's rise from a writer covering wedding announcements to one doing an exposÇ on welfare families. Under the tutelage of grizzled city editor Jack McGuire, Gallagher learns the ropes at the Rhode Island Wampanoag Times, albeit while still having to handle columns on new recipes and household hints. McGuire, supposedly impressed by Gallagher's spunk (though there's little evidence of it for the reader), lures her away from the women's page. After a story on the closing of a blue- blooded kindergarten, told with biting sarcasm, Gallagher's guts are no longer questioned, and she's ready to slug back countless cups of joe with the guys. Narrow-mindedly, her parents, whom she still lives with, are outraged by her upstart investigative reports, as is much of her readership. McGuire, however, falls in love with her, and the two begin to sneak off to out-of-town motels. Though he constantly berates her, McGuire has her best interests at heart and suggests that Gallagher apply to other newspapers, including the Depointe Bullet, in the tough working- class city of Depointe, Michigan. The managing editor there, charmed by her gritty application letter, hires her. But Gallagher learns that landing the job is easier than keeping it, what with all the in-house politicking, the sexual harassment, and the necessary challenge of holding her own with her hard-drinking fellow newsmen. By the close, both reader and Gallagher have learned much about the inner workings of the newspaper business before computers, but, given the surprise ending, it seems all for naught. McGarry's (The Courage of Girls, 1992, etc.) slow-paced disclosure of one woman's attempt to break into journalism delivers the whole package—people and plot—in a manner and style sufficiently mundane as never to sweep up the reader.*justify no*
Pub Date: July 31, 1997
ISBN: 0-8018-5634-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
Ng's emotionally complex debut novel sucks you in like a strong current and holds you fast until its final secrets surface.
Ng's nuanced debut novel begins with the death of a teenage girl and then uses the mysterious circumstances of her drowning as a springboard to dive into the troubled waters beneath the calm surface of her Chinese-American family.
When 16-year-old Lydia Lee fails to show up at breakfast one spring morning in 1977, and her body is later dragged from the lake in the Ohio college town where she and her biracial family don't quite fit in, her parents—blonde homemaker Marilyn and Chinese-American history professor James—older brother and younger sister get swept into the churning emotional conflicts and currents they've long sought to evade. What, or who, compelled Lydia—a promising student who could often be heard chatting happily on the phone; was doted on by her parents; and enjoyed an especially close relationship with her Harvard-bound brother, Nath—to slip away from home and venture out in a rowboat late at night when she had always been deathly afraid of water, refusing to learn to swim? The surprising answers lie deep beneath the surface, and Ng, whose stories have won awards including the Pushcart Prize, keeps an admirable grip on the narrative's many strands as she expertly explores and exposes the Lee family's secrets: the dreams that have given way to disappointment; the unspoken insecurities, betrayals and yearnings; the myriad ways the Lees have failed to understand one another and, perhaps, themselves. These long-hidden, quietly explosive truths, weighted by issues of race and gender, slowly bubble to the surface of Ng's sensitive, absorbing novel and reverberate long after its final page.
Ng's emotionally complex debut novel sucks you in like a strong current and holds you fast until its final secrets surface.Pub Date: June 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59420-571-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
A warmhearted and highly entertaining first novel in which a poor but plucky Kentucky gift with a sharp tongue, soft heart and strong spirit sets out on a cross-country trip and arrives at surprising new meanings for love, friendship, and family—as well as overcoming the big and little fears that inhibit lives. Taylor Greer has always been afraid of two things: tires, one of which she saw explode and cripple a local tobacco farmer; and pregnancy, the common, constricting fate of her own mother and, generally, of young girls in Pittman County, KY, where she has grown up. To avoid the latter, Taylor, born Marietta, sets out on a set of the former to find a new life in the West. What she doesn't count on, however, is her flighty '55 Volkswagon temporarily "giving out" in the Oklahoma flatlands or the ditching of a dumbstruck Indian baby in the car while she has it fixed. By the time Taylor's car breaks down again, and finally, in Tucson, Taylor has figured out that the baby has been badly abused, but not how to support it or herself, or how to lure the baby back into trust, growth, and speech. So—she takes a job in a dreaded tire-repair shop from which her car refuses to budge, and meets a motley collection of sanctuary workers, refugees, other ex-Kentuckians, social workers, and spinsters who, together, help her to bolster her courage and create a real family for her sweet, stunned, unbidden child. A lovely, funny, touching and humane debut, reminiscent of the work of Hilma Wolitzer and Francine Prose.
Pub Date: March 16, 1987
ISBN: 0060915544
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1987
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