Excruciating.
Trueblood (The Sperm Donor’s Daughter & Other Tales of Modern Family, 1998) considers the personal politics of choice in her first novel.
Nan is an obstetric nurse. She’s also the mother of a teenaged daughter and a young son, and she has a husband who’s semi-available emotionally—he sleeps in the shed when the pressures of marriage are just too much. Jean used to be a social worker. Now she’s managing a condominium complex and seething about the fact that her ex—with whom she tried for many years to have a child—has just become a father by his second wife. Virginia teaches college students to write, but she’s finding the job detrimental to the progress of her own novel as she cares for her young son and tends to her dissolving marriage. Tasi is a businesswoman who’s only just discovering that she’s not quite as satisfied with the commitment-free relationships she’s always cultivated. All of these women are approaching middle age, live in or around Seattle and have been friends since college. The book is constructed around one episode in the life of a fifth friend: Charlotte. Pregnant with a baby her husband doesn’t want, Charlotte decides to have a late-term abortion. While this synopsis is true enough in its details, it suggests a level of organization and narrative energy that the book lacks. As the central fact of the novel, Charlotte’s abortion should be a catalyzing event, one that provokes and challenges the other characters. Instead, each woman’s initial reaction to the abortion remains her only reaction. They all talk about it—isn’t that what girlfriends do?—but they just say the same things over and over again. Trueblood seems to have a perverse determination to avoid action whenever she can, preferring instead to render ostensibly important events in mental op-ed pieces and offhand recollections. The reader doesn’t even know for sure that the abortion has actually taken place until Jean and Nan are discussing it after the fact.
Excruciating.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-57962-151-1
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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