Uneven, but worth reading for its intimate look at a little-known community.
Pavees, or travelers, are a distinctive Irish sub-culture which Cummins celebrates in this uneven first novel, following her memoir A Rip in Heaven (2004).
They criss-cross Ireland in their wagons, mending pots and pans (hence the derogatory “tinkers”) and doing farm work, though by 1959, when the novel is set, the work is drying up. We see them through the eyes of 11-year-old Christy Hurley, a lively kid but one racked by guilt, because his mam died in childbirth and he feels he killed her, despite the protestations of his well-meaning father. Christy’s role model is his Grandda; he has a fond memory of helping Stephen, as capable as any vet, birth two foals for a desperate farmer. They kept the sickly one; now the colt Jack is Christy’s best friend. Grandda has just died as the novel opens; according to Pavee custom, his wagon and possessions must be burned. Christy grabs a newspaper photo from the flames, sensing its significance, though he can’t figure out the man, woman and baby it depicts, and he has another preoccupation: school. His first time. Though he loves reading, he’s stuck in with the third graders, but the staff are friendly; there’s even a sweet, mothering nun, a welcome change from the usual ruler-wielding harpy. Cummins does a fine job showing us Pavee culture: the joy of the open road, the fear of houses (they induce claustrophobia), the dutiful Catholicism, the need for mooching (panhandling) and occasional petty theft. But the coming-of-age narrative is weak. Christy does some sleuthing and discovers he’s the baby in that photograph; his mother never died in childbirth. That was a lie, his shame-faced father explains, at great length. What follows is a frantic moonlit ride, bullets, blood and a torrent of tears as Christy learns about the “dream-poison of love.” It’s all over-the-top, a far cry from the powerful realism of that barnyard birthing.
Uneven, but worth reading for its intimate look at a little-known community.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-451-22948-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
A heartfelt tale of love too stubborn to surrender to human frailties.
When Chi Chi Donatelli gave famous crooner Saverio Armandonada a manicure on a 1930s New Jersey beach, little did she know that the swanky singer would change her life.
After his childhood sweetheart married another man, Saverio left the security of his job on the factory line in Detroit, earning his father’s disapproval but opening wide the door to success as a big-band singer. Along his way to stardom, Saverio changed his name to Tony Arma and discovered a talent for romancing—but never marrying—the ladies. But once he meets Chi Chi, his bachelor days are numbered. From a large, boisterous Italian family, Chi Chi is eager to have a life like Tony’s, with the freedom to sing and travel the country. She wants no part of marriage with its shackles. Soon Chi Chi and Tony are touring together, eventually developing a profitable shtick, with Chi Chi writing bestselling songs and Tony serenading them to dreamy audiences. It’s only a matter of time before Tony proposes. After all, unlike his other girls, Chi Chi offers Tony not only beauty and charm, but also the stability of a home. The lovers’ work in the entertainment industry gives way to a marriage blessed with babies yet held apart by war. Once reunited, Chi Chi’s independence and Tony’s philandering further fracture their marriage. But as Tony’s path wends from woman to woman, Chi Chi forges a new life on her own terms. A mistress of the sweeping family saga, bestselling author Trigiani (Kiss Carlo, 2017, etc.) sets Chi Chi and Tony’s lifelong love affair against the grand stage of World War II through the postwar boom years and the women’s liberation movement, tracing a society catching up with Chi Chi’s determination to control her own financial and personal freedom.
A heartfelt tale of love too stubborn to surrender to human frailties.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-231925-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Bestselling Hannah (True Colors, 2009, etc.) sabotages a worthy effort with an overly neat resolution.
A Russian refugee’s terrible secret overshadows her family life.
Meredith, heir apparent to her family’s thriving Washington State apple enterprises, and Nina, a globetrotting photojournalist, grew up feeling marginalized by their mother. Anya saw her daughters as merely incidental to her grateful love for their father Evan, who rescued her from a German prison camp. The girls know neither their mother’s true age, nor the answers to several other mysteries: her color-blindness, her habit of hoarding food despite the family’s prosperity and the significance of her “winter garden” with its odd Cyrillic-inscribed columns. The only thawing in Anya’s mien occurs when she relates a fairy tale about a peasant girl who meets a prince and their struggles to live happily ever after during the reign of a tyrannical Black Knight. After Evan dies, the family comes unraveled: Anya shows signs of dementia; Nina and Meredith feud over whether to move Mom from her beloved dacha-style home, named Belye Nochi after the summer “white nights” of her native Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Anya, now elderly but of preternaturally youthful appearance—her white hair has been that way as long as the girls can remember—keeps babbling about leather belts boiled for soup, furniture broken up for firewood and other oddities. Prompted by her daughters’ snooping and a few vodka-driven dinners, she grudgingly divulges her story. She is not Anya, but Vera, sole survivor of a Russian family; her father, grandmother, mother, sister, husband and two children were all lost either to Stalin’s terror or during the German army’s siege of Leningrad. Anya’s chronicle of the 900-day siege, during which more than half a million civilians perished from hunger and cold, imparts new gravitas to the novel, easily overwhelming her daughters’ more conventional “issues.” The effect, however, is all but vitiated by a manipulative and contrived ending.
Bestselling Hannah (True Colors, 2009, etc.) sabotages a worthy effort with an overly neat resolution.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-36412-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
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