Tasty but filling: a rich (too rich, perhaps) portrait of a time and a place that have received less than their fair share...
The first of a two-volume portrait of 1970s England, focused here by the prizewinning Coe (The House of Sleep, 1998, etc.) on a circle of four Birmingham schoolmates.
Perhaps it is a delusion to suppose that we write our own histories. The author seems to suggest so by unfolding his narrative from the perspective of the children of two of the protagonists, who meet in Berlin, in 2003, and reminisce about their parents, who were young so long ago, in “a world without mobiles or videos or Playstations or even faxes.” The friends—Phillip, Benjamin, Harding, and Douglas—met at King William’s, a “fucking toff’s academy” in Birmingham, during the dreary decade that brought bad clothes, racial guilt, and good stereo systems to the farthest corners of the Queen’s realm. The early 1970s were dominated by labor strife, the unions taking a final bow and bringing down governments and paralyzing life for everyone with their strikes. Not all of the boys at King William’s are preppie brats, however—Douglas’s father Bill Anderton works at the troubled British Leyland factory—and even their fustiest schoolmasters support the Labour Party. The most reactionary elements in Birmingham, in fact, are to be found farther down the social scale, in those like shop steward Roy Slater (Bill Anderton’s nemesis) and his racist friends from the National Front. Much of the historical background—the wedding of Princess Anne, for example, or the political fall of Enoch Powell—may be unfamiliar to Americans, but the story’s basic outlines (young people discovering the world and following the course of their lives) are amiable and clear. Eventually, the focus becomes the shy Benjamin and his hopeless love for Cicely. There’s a happy ending of sorts, but plenty of questions wait for Part II.
Tasty but filling: a rich (too rich, perhaps) portrait of a time and a place that have received less than their fair share of literary attention.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41383-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
An exuberant comic opera set to the music of life.
The versatile and accomplished McBride (Five Carat Soul, 2017, etc.) returns with a dark urban farce crowded with misjudged signals, crippling sorrows, and unexpected epiphanies.
It's September 1969, just after Apollo 11 and Woodstock. In a season of such events, it’s just as improbable that in front of 16 witnesses occupying the crowded plaza of a Brooklyn housing project one afternoon, a hobbling, dyspeptic, and boozy old church deacon named Cuffy Jasper "Sportcoat" Lambkin should pull out a .45-caliber Luger pistol and shoot off an ear belonging to the neighborhood’s most dangerous drug dealer. The 19-year-old victim’s name is Deems Clemens, and Sportcoat had coached him to be “the best baseball player the projects had ever seen” before he became “a poison-selling murderous meathead.” Everybody in the project presumes that Sportcoat is now destined to violently join his late wife, Hettie, in the great beyond. But all kinds of seemingly disconnected people keep getting in destiny's way, whether it’s Sportcoat’s friend Pork Sausage or Potts, a world-weary but scrupulous White policeman who’s hoping to find Sportcoat fast enough to protect him from not only Deems’ vengeance, but the malevolent designs of neighborhood kingpin Butch Moon. All their destines are somehow intertwined with those of Thomas “The Elephant” Elefante, a powerful but lonely Mafia don who’s got one eye trained on the chaos set off by the shooting and another on a mysterious quest set in motion by a stranger from his crime-boss father’s past. There are also an assortment of salsa musicians, a gentle Nation of Islam convert named Soup, and even a tribe of voracious red ants that somehow immigrated to the neighborhood from Colombia and hung around for generations, all of which seems like too much stuff for any one book to handle. But as he's already shown in The Good Lord Bird (2013), McBride has a flair for fashioning comedy whose buoyant outrageousness barely conceals both a steely command of big and small narrative elements and a river-deep supply of humane intelligence.
An exuberant comic opera set to the music of life.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1672-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
An absolutely delightful read, perfect for a summer day with a good beer and a piece of pie.
A family inheritance tears two Minnesota sisters apart—but years later, they might get a chance to reunite.
Edith Magnusson never expected to be famous for anything, let alone her pies. But the pies she makes at her humble nursing-home job put the place on the map, and soon people are traveling from all over to try a slice. At 64 years old, it seems she’s starting a new life...but Edith doesn’t know what’s in store for her future. Although she remains a talented baker, the years to come leave her widowed, underemployed, and taking care of her teenage granddaughter, Diana. The two of them manage to barely scrape by, but Edith often wonders how her life would have been different if she’d received her portion of the inheritance from her family’s farm after her father died. Instead, Edith’s younger sister, Helen, convinced their father to give her the entire inheritance so she could build a successful brewery with her husband. Helen made good on her promise, turning Blotz beer into one of the country’s most prominent brands, but it comes at a cost. Edith stops speaking to Helen, and Helen doesn’t reach out to fix the rift. Many years later, by coincidence, Diana ends up working in a brewery. She shows both an interest and skill in making beer, and soon she’s a rising star in the world of brewing. As Diana’s career takes off, she needs all the help from her family she can get—which just might mean a chance for Edith and Helen to reconnect. Stradal’s (Kitchens of the Great Midwest, 2015) writing is sharp and funny while still managing to treat each character with warmth and respect. His women are complicated and interesting people who find fulfillment in hard work—and, perhaps most refreshingly, he never mocks the career hopes of older women. Although the characters' lives are full of loss—Edith of her husband, Diana of her parents, all of them of various unfulfilled dreams—the story doesn’t wallow in grief or indulge in despair. Instead, this is an ultimately hopeful and heartwarming story that never feels sentimental or trite. Readers will love watching these truly original characters overcome their challenges and take care of each other.
An absolutely delightful read, perfect for a summer day with a good beer and a piece of pie.Pub Date: July 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-56305-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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