A quiet debut, its very understatement giving rise to its poignancy and strength.
With subtlety and grace, a first novel—actually a series of eight linked, chronologically arranged stories—illuminates momentous if commonplace events in the lives of a modern New England family.
It’s 1979, and O’Neil’s parents, Arthur and Miriam, are preparing to visit him at his New Hampshire college. Each has a secret: she’s just learned that she probably has breast cancer; he’s just written a note to Dora Auclaire, a family friend he believes he’s fallen in love with. Those secrets are never divulged (though Arthur’s note will surface later). On their return to Glenn’s Mills, New York, they take a wrong turn in a snowstorm and are killed; their deaths will reverberate throughout these pages. O’Neil’s future wife Mary is introduced well into the novel, working rather aimlessly at a bar in a Minnesota college town not far from where she grew up. Pregnant by her artist roommate, a man she doesn’t particularly like, she decides on abortion: “How terrible, she thought, to be twenty-two, and already have the worst thing of her life to remember.” Cronin only sparingly sketches the details of how Mary and O’Neil meet, while their wedding is related in a brilliant passage titled simply “Groom.” Late for the ceremony, O’Neil remembers his parents: “He holds the picture in his mind as long as he can, until . . . the signal breaks up like a radio station gone out of range.” Nothing very unusual happens to the couple. They become teachers, have children, incur debts, face marital problems. Much of the story’s second half is taken up with O’Neil’s sister Kay, now stricken with cancer. Throughout, O’Neil himself is cast in the everyday roles of son, brother, husband, and father, yet Cronin infuses these passages of common life with a tenderness and depth that draw the reader in.
A quiet debut, its very understatement giving rise to its poignancy and strength.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-33358-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Hannah, after eight paperbacks, abandons her successful time-travelers for a hardcover life of kitchen-sink romance. Everyone must have got the Olympic Peninsula memo for this spring because, as of this reading, authors Hannah, Nora Roberts, and JoAnn Ross have all placed their newest romances in or near the Quinault rain forest. Here, 40ish Annie Colwater, returns to Washington State after her husband, high-powered Los Angeles lawyer Blake, tells her he’s found another (younger) woman and wants a divorce. Although a Stanford graduate, Annie has known only a life of perfect wifedom: matching Blake’s ties to his suits and cooking meals from Gourmet magazine. What is she to do with her shattered life? Well, she returns to dad’s house in the small town of Mystic, cuts off all her hair (for a different look), and goes to work as a nanny for lawman Nick Delacroix, whose wife has committed suicide, whose young daughter Izzy refuses to speak, and who himself has descended into despair and alcoholism. Annie spruces up Nick’s home on Mystic Lake and sends “Izzy-bear” back into speech mode. And, after Nick begins attending AA meetings, she and he become lovers. Still, when Annie learns that she’s pregnant not with Nick’s but with Blake’s child, she heads back to her empty life in the Malibu Colony. The baby arrives prematurely, and mean-spirited Blake doesn’t even stick around to support his wife. At this point, it’s perfectly clear to Annie—and the reader—that she’s justified in taking her newborn daughter and driving back north. Hannah’s characters indulge in so many stages of the weeps, from glassy eyes to flat-out sobs, that tear ducts are almost bound to stay dry. (First printing of 100,000; first serial to Good Housekeeping; Literary Guild/Doubleday book club selections)
Pub Date: March 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-609-60249-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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