Lively but broad and overcaffeinated.
Di Prisco's latest is part Mafia thriller, part comic farce, part lament about the anguish of dementia—and all hyperkinetic.
Mikey Festagiacamo is a second-generation mob boss who should, at 57, be in his prime. But as the novel opens, he's suffering ever more frequent memory lapses that seem to presage the same slow, fatal progress his father experienced with dementia—the Alzhammer, in Mikey's lingo—and this is intolerable. Just as Mikey's pondering suicide, a new and mysterious outfit starts trying to kill him, and having his ticket punched by someone else is an indignity not to be suffered. Enter Zayana, Mikey's ex, who's been romantically involved with a sinister U.S. senator and whose attempts to disentangle herself (and get a bit of payola on the way out) seem to have precipitated the crisis. Mikey hands the reins of the family business to his sister, an ex-academic who turns out to be ideally suited to the role of Don Rosey, and he and Zayana (pretending to be Christian Scientists) hide out in an unlicensed nursing home near Las Vegas, where Mikey befriends a transgender nurse named Carololina and acquires a sex-starved septuagenarian sidekick named Hercules. After a whorehouse-and-casino van trip Mikey leads goes first bad and then, thanks to security videotape, viral, one of Mikey's old gunsels and the senator's chief enforcer show up for a final confrontation in the "Goners' Ward." The novel is fast-paced and often charming, especially in the nursing-home scenes, but its attitude toward subtlety isn't so much to eschew it as (this happens to a would-be assassin in the novel) to run it over with a Ferrari and then bring in a milk truck to mangle the corpse and drag it several miles.
Lively but broad and overcaffeinated.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-942600-43-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Vireo/Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A deft, patient portrait of grief.
After calamity strikes, the members of the Olander family struggle to find their paths back to each other.
The children of an American father and an Indian mother, Karina and Prem Olander have learned to stick together. Thirteen-year-old Karina defends Prem, 8, from school bullies and even walks hand in hand with him on the way home, but she wants her time alone, too. Pushing Prem away one afternoon so that she can spend time trying on makeup and talking to her best friend, however, leads to a deadly accident. With each chapter telling the story from a different family member’s perspective, Gowda (The Golden Son, 2016, etc.) traces the fallout lines with compassion and a keen eye for the lies we tell ourselves to avoid facing our own demons. While Prem watches from someplace after death, his and Karina's parents split up, with their father, Keith, submerging himself in his work in the financial industry and making some ethically questionable decisions. Their mother, Jaya, drifts away from everyone, rediscovering her spirituality, spending hours in ritualized prayer, building a temple in the family's home, and following the teachings of a prominent Hindu guru. With Prem’s chapters underdeveloped, Gowda focuses primarily on Karina, tracing her spiral first into depression and then into self-destructive behavior. Once she leaves for college, Karina is primed to fall in love, to be betrayed, and to find solace at the Sanctuary. A communal farm headed by the charismatic Micah, the Sanctuary offers Karina meaningful work surrounded by people who embrace her, bearing witness to her sense of guilt. But as Karina begins to suspect that Micah may not be quite who he claims to be, Gowda ratchets up the tension, shifting gears into a thriller late in the game, setting in motion the family’s reunion.
A deft, patient portrait of grief.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293322-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Custom House/Morrow
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A compelling story about a woman in a deeply patriarchal society.
A 33-year-old woman in Seoul slowly breaks under the burden of misogyny she's been facing all her life.
Kim Jiyoung’s life is typical of a woman in South Korea. Born the second of three siblings, with an older sister and younger brother, her experiences with patriarchy begin early. At home, her brother gets preferential treatment and less responsibility. At school, she’s told that boys who bully her just like her. Though her mother encourages and supports her in myriad ways, including making sure she goes to university and follows her heart, Jiyoung grows to realize that in every aspect of life and work, women are dehumanized, devalued, and objectified. The book’s strength lies in how succinctly Cho captures the relentless buildup of sexism and gender discrimination over the course of one woman’s life. With clinical detachment, the book covers Jiyoung’s childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, first job, and, finally, marriage and motherhood. The pressure of the patriarchy is so incessant that she starts to dissociate, transforming into other women she’s known, like her mother and her college friend. The central critique of patriarchy is clearly—and necessarily—tied in to that of capitalism. Jiyoung wonders, as she catalogs the ways in which the world is built to accommodate “maximum output with minimum input...who’ll be the last one standing in a world with these priorities, and will they be happy?” To be clear, there’s nothing revolutionary here—it’s basically feminism 101 but in novel form, complete with occasional footnotes. There is not a single move to recognize anything outside of a binary gender. But the story perfectly captures misogynies large and small that will be recognizable to many.
A compelling story about a woman in a deeply patriarchal society.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-670-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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