Soap opera, but a pretty good one, with a feel for the era (the ’70s), and a nicely satisfying end.
A debut novel by poet Bialosky (Wanting a Child, 1998) about a young woman’s attempt to come to terms with her unhappy childhood.
Anna Crane is going to be married. That’s enough to make anyone wistful, but Anna has another reason to be jittery: The wedding will be in her hometown of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, where she hasn’t set foot since she basically ran away from home decades ago. A middle child, Anna was the second daughter of Lilly and Lawrence Crane, a happy Russian-Jewish couple from Cleveland. Lawrence was a builder who made good money during the housing boom of the 1950s and settled his family in a beautiful home far removed from the grit of midwestern city life—but died suddenly in 1961 while changing a light bulb. Lilly’s grief knew no bounds: Not only had she lost her husband, she found herself thrown on the mercy of in-laws who considered her beneath Lawrence in the first place. With no intention of working, Lilly began cultivating men the way gardeners do plants, finally marrying the rich but unpleasant (and gentile) Max McCarthy. Anna puts up with her mother’s flirtatious ways better than her older sister Ruthie—who goes to live with her aunt after her mother remarries—but that’s partly because Anna feels she has more to learn than her sister. For some time, after all, the teenaged Anna has been obsessing over Austin Cooper, a hapless but handsome classmate who has dropped out of school to work as a stablehand. An ignoramus and a gambler, Austin is the wrong man for Anna, but she falls for him in the hopeless style of the young and becomes pregnant. Meanwhile, Lilly, who has been telling Anna what she must do to “win” Austin, seems to be taking an interest in him herself.
Soap opera, but a pretty good one, with a feel for the era (the ’70s), and a nicely satisfying end.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-15-100685-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Shalvis’ latest retains her spark and sizzle.
Piper Manning is determined to sell her family’s property so she can leave her hometown behind, but when her siblings come back with life-changing secrets and her sexy neighbor begins to feel like “The One,” she might have to redo her to-do list.
As children, Piper and her younger siblings, Gavin and Winnie, were sent to live with their grandparents in Wildstone, California, from the Congo after one of Gavin’s friends was killed. Their parents were supposed to meet them later but never made it. Piper wound up being more of a parent than her grandparents, though: “In the end, Piper had done all the raising. It’d taken forever, but now, finally, her brother and sister were off living their own lives.” Piper, the queen of the bullet journal, plans to fix up the family’s lakeside property her grandparents left the three siblings when they died. Selling it will enable her to study to be a physician’s assistant as she’s always wanted. However, just as the goal seems in sight, Gavin and Winnie come home, ostensibly for Piper’s 30th birthday, and then never leave. Turns out, Piper’s brother and sister have recently managed to get into a couple buckets of trouble, and they need some time to reevaluate their options. They aren’t willing to share their problems with Piper, though they’ve been completely open with each other. And Winnie, who’s pregnant, has been very open with Piper’s neighbor Emmitt Reid and his visiting son, Camden, since the baby’s father is Cam’s younger brother, Rowan, who died a few months earlier in a car accident. Everyone has issues to navigate, made more complicated by Gavin and Winnie’s swearing Cam to secrecy just as he and Piper try—and fail—to ignore their attraction to each other. Shalvis keeps the physical and emotional tension high, though the siblings’ refusal to share with Piper becomes tedious and starts to feel childish.
Shalvis’ latest retains her spark and sizzle.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296139-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Original and earnest, informed both by human limitation and human potential.
The author returns to the Arkansas setting of They Tell Me of a Home (2005).
It’s 1941, and Gustavus and Emma Jean Peace have just had their seventh child. Gus had hoped to be through having babies. Emma Jean—disappointed with six boys—is determined to try one last time for a girl. When God doesn’t give her a daughter, she decides to make one herself. Naming the new baby “Perfect” and blackmailing the midwife to aid her in her desperate deception, Emma Jean announces the birth of a girl. For eight years, Emma Jean outfits her youngest child in pretty dresses, gives her all the indulgences she longed for in her own blighted girlhood and hides the truth from everyone—even herself. But when the truth comes out, Emma Jean is a pariah and her most-treasured child becomes a freak. It’s hard to know quite what to make of this impassioned, imperfect novel. While another writer might have chosen to complement the sensationalism of his scenario with a tempered style, Black narrates his tale in the key of melodrama. He devotes a considerable number of pages to Emma Jean’s experience as the unloved, darker (and therefore ugly) daughter, but since no amount of back story can justify Emma-Jean’s actions, these passages become redundant. And, most crucially, Black builds toward the point when Perfect discovers that she’s a boy, but seems confused about what to do with his character after this astonishing revelation. At the same time, the author offers a nuanced portrait of an insular community’s capacity to absorb difference, and it’s a cold reader who will be unmoved by his depictions.
Original and earnest, informed both by human limitation and human potential.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-58267-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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