Leaden, pretentious, and dull: a Harlequin romance in writing-program prose.
The latest strange love tale from Harrison (The Binding Chair, 2000, etc.), who heads north to Alaska this time to follow the sorrows of a young weatherman.
Harrison’s taste for perverse love pre-dated her famous incest-memoir (The Kiss, 1997), and it has apparently not abated much since then. Here, she offers the account of an obsessive young man who finds himself possessed by two speechless women in Anchorage during the early years of the 20th century. Bigelow, a meteorologist sent north by the Weather Bureau in 1915, is a thoughtful, shy type not well suited to the kind of frontier life that Anchorage (a large camp, basically, of some 2,000 men and very few women) then provided. His job is a simple one: to wire the climate statistics daily to Washington, DC, and provide forecasts for the benefit of the local railway workers. He has a fair amount of time on his hands, and distractions are few and far between in Anchorage. He soon meets and falls in love a silent young Aleut woman who becomes his lover for a time but eventually disappears as wordlessly as she arrived. Crestfallen and melancholic, he puts his energies into the construction of a giant kite (the largest ever made) to be used for weather readings. He also becomes obsessed with a beautiful white girl named Miriam who sings but cannot speak. Miriam and her father, a shady storekeeper, trick Bigelow into proposing marriage to her, but he is still haunted by his Aleut girl. There is a good deal of grief and plenty of heavy prose (“Bigelow realizes that he’s been dead for the past year. Dead ever since the Aleut disappeared. . . .”), but everything gets patched up in good time for Bigelow to fly his kite with the Aleut girl by his side in the end.
Leaden, pretentious, and dull: a Harlequin romance in writing-program prose.Pub Date: May 7, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50629-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
Most enjoyable for its smart, often humorous details about moviemaking and celebrity culture.
A portrait of the actress as a young woman.
We meet Molly Bit in a chapter called "College: 1993." It’s an arts school where “everybody wanted to be famous…and if they didn’t get famous, they might die right there in their beds.” Unlike the other kids, Molly Bit has no doubt that she will hit the mark, and after a brief second chapter called "Dues: 1997," we arrive at "Success: 2001." By now, Molly has made two movies with her best friend and has appeared in a three-page photo spread in Vanity Fair titled “Girl From the Future: Why in Six Months Everyone Will Know Who Molly Bit Is.” This proves to be no exaggeration—she soon reaches mega-star status, with the action figures and tabloid exposés to prove it. By "Venice: 2006," she’s got a publicist, a personal assistant, and a bodyguard she’s paying 50,000 euros for four days—because she also has a very persistent stalker. The plot of Bevacqua’s debut has a dramatic twist two-thirds of the way through, but there’s something a bit mechanical about it, and subsequent sections lose momentum. Though the author sets out to reveal the human being inside a Hollywood legend, Molly never quite comes into focus. We spend a fair amount of time inside her head, but her thoughts have a generic quality: “Southern California tried to rob you of your deep interiority. LA did. Hollywood. It was impossible not to lose at least some of it, for shallow thoughts and conversations to cast a spell that sealed a layer off. For six months she’d been contemplating an ass lift.” This feels more like a hypothesis about what an actress would think than what one specific, fully realized character thinks.
Most enjoyable for its smart, often humorous details about moviemaking and celebrity culture.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-0458-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
A wise and sad coming-of-age story showing how people are shaped by their losses. Recommended for both adult and teenage...
The tangled destinies of three kids growing up in a tightknit African-American community in Southern California.
“She was seventeen then. She lived with her father, a Marine, and without her mother, who had killed herself six months earlier. Since then the girl had earned a wild reputation—she was young and scared and trying to hide her scared in her prettiness.” Bennett’s debut novel tells the story of this grieving 17-year-old girl, Nadia, her best friend, Aubrey, and her boyfriend, Luke, told partly by Nadia and partly by a chorus of eponymous “Mothers,” the church ladies of Upper Room Chapel, where Luke’s father is the pastor. The three teenagers are drawn together by the damage they have already suffered: Luke’s promising football career was ended by a terrible injury; Aubrey has moved away from home to escape abuse by her stepfather. More trouble awaits when Nadia discovers she's carrying Luke’s baby and decides not to keep it. This decision creates a web of secrets that endures for decades—though the ever watchful, ever gossiping Mothers never stop sniffing around and suspecting. Nadia tries to escape the clutches of small-town drama by attending college and law school across the country, but when she returns home to care for her ailing father, she finds herself enmeshed in unfinished business. “All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we’d taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season.” Far from reliably offering love, protection, and care, in this book, the mothers cause all the trouble.
A wise and sad coming-of-age story showing how people are shaped by their losses. Recommended for both adult and teenage readers.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5247-0986-0
Page Count: 435
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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