A spellbinding collection that explodes every anodyne myth about Nantucket while fostering some new ones.
Two centuries of strange on Nantucket Island.
In Vanderslice’s new collection, the eponymous fog is a metaphor for moral ambiguity. “Guilty Look” provides an early (set in 1795) example of bankers exploiting the justice system for personal gain. In “King Philip’s War” (1823), the uneasy friendship of two boys, white and Indian, echoes the détente between their respective populations. Orpha, who has heard nothing of her whaler husband, Reuben, for more than three years, happily gives up on him in “On Cherry Street” (1837). In “Taste” (1846), Gideon, a once-promising ship’s captain, has worked as a night watchman for almost three decades, since his ship was wrecked by a sperm whale. In weeks adrift on a small boat, Gideon resorted to cannibalism, a “taste” which has not left him since. On Vanderslice’s Nantucket, modernity does nothing to mediate the macabre, menacing and mysterious. In “How Long Will You Tarry?” (1920), a black schoolteacher descended from the island’s African settlers encounters an eerie reminder of incipient racial prejudice on her walk home. A plumber is forced to face the truth about the only woman who loved him in “Morning Meal” (1999). The increasingly upscale Nantucket of the 2000s harbors even more danger. In “Beaten,” a vacationer’s daily run becomes a nightmare as a stranger dogs his steps like a Nike-clad fury. A gay man suddenly summoned off island by a fickle Bostonian lover weighs his options while a nightly, ghostly presence weighs down his chest in “Haunted.” The title of “Newfoundland” suggests the longed-for escape of a successful auto dealer whose social-climbing wife is bankrupting him. Hosanna, a Jamaican single mother who's trying to survive with her two children by running a snack shop, finds her precarious security further undermined by the woman she trusted to manage the slacker summer help in “Managing Business.” In the supremely unsettling title story, Doug, another slacker, finds himself drawn into a Faustian bargain with a uniquely New England twist.
A spellbinding collection that explodes every anodyne myth about Nantucket while fostering some new ones.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-935084-41-9
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Lavender Ink
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
Thoroughbreds and Virginia blue-bloods cavort, commit murder, and fall in love in Roberts's (Hidden Riches, 1994, etc.) latest romantic thriller — this one set in the world of championship horse racing. Rich, sheltered Kelsey Byden is recovering from a recent divorce when she receives a letter from her mother, Naomi, a woman she has believed dead for over 20 years. When Kelsey confronts her genteel English professor father, though, he sheepishly confesses that, no, her mother isn't dead; throughout Kelsey's childhood, she was doing time for the murder of her lover. Kelsey meets with Naomi and not only finds her quite charming, but the owner of Three Willows, one of the most splendid horse farms in Virginia. Kelsey is further intrigued when she meets Gabe Slater, a blue-eyed gambling man who owns a neighboring horse farm; when one of Gabe's horses is mated with Naomi's, nostrils flare, flanks quiver, and the romance is on. Since both Naomi and Gabe have horses entered in the Kentucky Derby, Kelsey is soon swept into the whirlwind of the Triple Crown, in spite of her family's objections to her reconciliation with the notorious Naomi. The rivalry between the two horse farms remains friendly, but other competitors — one of them is Gabe's father, a vicious alcoholic who resents his son's success — prove less scrupulous. Bodies, horse and human, start piling up, just as Kelsey decides to investigate the murky details of her mother's crime. Is it possible she was framed? The ground is thick with no-goods, including haughty patricians, disgruntled grooms, and jockeys with tragic pasts, but despite all the distractions, the identity of the true culprit behind the mayhem — past and present — remains fairly obvious. The plot lopes rather than races to the finish. Gambling metaphors abound, and sexual doings have a distinctly equine tone. But Roberts's style has a fresh, contemporary snap that gets the story past its own worst excesses.
Pub Date: June 13, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14059-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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