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MY MOTHER’S LOVERS

Name: MY MOTHER’S LOVERS
Author: Joy Passanante
ISBN: 0-87417-495-3

by Joy Passanante ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2002

Overwritten and underwhelming.

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The daughter of two hippies must confront some unresolved family business.

Poet and storywriter Passanante’s first novel, the latest in this university press’s Western Literature Series, strikes familiar chords. It’s another of those well-intentioned stories that works hard to give life to a theme by now as picked-over as department-store bargain tables: the relationship between mother and daughter. Narrator Lake Rose Davis circles around her characters rather than getting a convincing fix on any of them as she recalls life with Mom and Dad in Wilders Ferry, Idaho. Her parents are known locally as the people who live in a purple house and once traveled around in a painted school bus. Kirk runs a bookstore; Mimi is an artist who has cut off relations with her family in St. Louis, except for her glamorous but needy sister DeeDee. As a small child, Lake adored Mimi, but then she sees her in the arms of first a handsome logger and then the enigmatic beautician Graceanne. Eventually, Lake begins to resent her mother’s self-absorbed behavior and the silence she maintains about her family. Just before she turns 15, Lake comes down with a mysterious illness that isn’t diagnosed as rheumatic fever until weeks of uncertainty have passed. (This seems both unlikely and hokey, given that these events occur in the 1980s.) In a trip to St. Louis, Lake finally meets her grandparents, Vin and Pearl Rose, when Mimi leaves her in their care. She learns that Granddad, an Italian-American, was a doctor who served in WWII, and Grandma is the daughter of Jewish immigrants. Both have been grievously hurt by Mimi’s behavior. As Lake recuperates, then stays on after a tragic accident, she learns more about her family, Mimi, and the binding ties of love as she chases her own dreams.

Overwritten and underwhelming.

Pub Date: March 1, 2002

ISBN: 0-87417-495-3

Page Count: 232

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.

Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946

ISBN: 0452277507

Page Count: 114

Publisher: Harcourt, Brace

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
GEORGE ORWELL
by George Orwell ; edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
DIARIES
by George Orwell & edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
ALL ART IS PROPAGANDA
by George Orwell

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.