Hemmings pulls off a remarkable feat in making the Kings’ sense of loss all the more wrenching for being directed at a woman...
Hemming’s first novel expands on a short story, “The Minor Wars,” that appeared in her debut story collection (House of Thieves, 2005) about a self-consciously privileged Hawaiian family in crisis.
The great-grandson of a Hawaiian princess, lawyer Matt King is under pressure to decide to whom his family should sell its vast land holdings when he learns that his wife Joanie, comatose since a boat-racing accident, is definitely going to die once the hospital removes life support. A beautiful model with a penchant for hard drinking and fast boats, Joanie has always chafed at her quiet domestic life with Matt, a workaholic trying to live off his career rather than his inheritance. Matt has left the day-to-day rearing of their daughters Scottie and Alex to Joanie and now feels inept as he reaches out to the girls. Scottie is a classic ten-year-old, that painful mix of pseudo-sophistication and clueless innocence. Sent by Joannie to boarding school for typical rich-kid bad behavior (cocaine), Alex comes home at the cusp of maturity, still furious with her parents but self-aware. Pressed, she tells Matt that she caught Joanie having an affair. Matt now must deal with his sense of betrayal as well as his and his daughters’ grief. Unlikely help comes from Alex’s maybe-boyfriend Sid, whose laid-back wisdom has been hard-earned. Matt takes the girls and Sid in search of Joanie’s lover to let him know her condition—and he soon realizes that the man did not love Joanie and perhaps used her to sway Matt’s decision about the land sale.
Hemmings pulls off a remarkable feat in making the Kings’ sense of loss all the more wrenching for being directed at a woman who was neither a good wife nor a good mother.Pub Date: May 22, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6633-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
A book about triumphing over obstacles, and obstacles, and obstacles, and more obstacles.
An aimless young man decides to get his life together, but life has other plans.
Mike Muñoz doesn’t quite know what he wants out of life, but he knows he deserves better than what he’s got now: a terrible job cutting lawns, a truck that barely runs, and a tiny house packed with a disabled brother, an exhausted mother, and his mother’s broke boyfriend who likes to watch porn in the living room while jamming on his bass guitar. Soon enough, however, he doesn’t even have the job or the truck, and, in an ill-fated attempt to guilt-trip his mom into kicking out her boyfriend, Mike takes up residence in a shed in the backyard. Despite the steady stream of bad luck and worse decisions, Evison (This Is Your Life Harriet Chance, 2015, etc.) brings genuine humor to Mike's trials and tribulations. The writing is razor-sharp, and Evison has an unerring eye for the small details that snap a scene or a character into focus. The first-person narration turns Mike into a living, breathing person, and the reader can’t help but get pulled into his worldview. “After all, most of us are mowing someone else’s lawn, one way or another, and most of us can’t afford to travel the world or live in New York City. Most of us feel like the world is giving us a big fat middle finger when it’s not kicking us in the face with a steel-toed boot. And most of us feel powerless. Motivated but powerless.” The novel has a light tone and is laugh-out-loud funny at times, but at a certain point, Mike's trials and tribulations move from comically frustrating to just frustrating. With so much going wrong for him, the reader can expect that the universe will smile on Mike eventually, but there’s only so many sick family members, unpaid bills, bad jobs, awkward situations, and thwarted plans a character can suffer through. We root for Mike while also wishing we didn’t have to root so hard.
A book about triumphing over obstacles, and obstacles, and obstacles, and more obstacles.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61620-262-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
This quirky, complex, and frustrating heroine will win hearts and challenge assumptions about family dysfunction and mental...
With the help of unusual houseguests, a teenage girl who tries to rebel by airing her family’s dirty laundry cleans up her act instead.
To Merit Voss, the white picket fence around her house is the only thing normal about the family it contains. She lives in a converted church with her father, stepmother, and siblings, and although her parents have been divorced for years, her mother still lives in the basement, struggling with social anxiety. No one in her family is religious, so her brother Utah updates the church marquee every day with fun facts instead of Bible verses. Merit is less accomplished than her identical twin sister, Honor, so she likes to buy used trophies to celebrate her failures. But Honor seems to have a fetish for terminally ill boys, so it’s a surprise to Merit when Sagan, who is perfectly healthy, kisses Merit after mistaking her for her sister—and then reveals that he’s living in their house. Soon they have another houseguest, Luck, whose connection to the family makes Merit even more convinced she’s living in a madhouse. So why is everyone so angry at her? Merit has a love/hate relationship with her sister. She's conflicted by her feelings for Sagan, who leaves intriguing sketches (illustrated by Adams) around the house for her to decipher. She’s simultaneously intrigued and repulsed by Luck, who annoys her with his questions but is also her confidant. She can’t sit through dinner without starting a fight; she’s been skipping school for days; and when she decides to give her whole family the silent treatment, Sagan is the only one who notices. In fact, he and Luck are the only people in the house who recognize Merit’s quirks for what they really are—cries for help. And when Merit takes drastic measures to be heard, the fallout is both worse and much better than she feared. Hoover (It Ends With Us, 2016, etc.) does an excellent job of revealing the subtle differences between healthy teenage rebellion and clinical depression, and Merit’s aha moment is worthy of every trophy in her collection.
This quirky, complex, and frustrating heroine will win hearts and challenge assumptions about family dysfunction and mental illness in a life-affirming story that redefines what’s normal.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7062-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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