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
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As vivid and moving as the novel is, it’s not because Haslett strives to surprise but because he’s so mindful and expressive...
This touching chronicle of love and pain traces half a century in a family of five from the parents’ engagement in 1963 through a father’s and son’s psychological torments and a final crisis.
Something has happened to Michael in the opening pages, which are told in the voice of his brother, Alec. The next chapter is narrated by Margaret, the mother of Michael, 12, Celia, 10, and Alec, 7, and the wife of John, as they prepare for a vacation in Maine. Soon, a flashback reveals that shortly before John and Margaret were to wed, she learned of his periodic mental illness, a “sort of hibernation” in which “the mind closes down.” She marries him anyway and comes to worry about the recurrence of his hibernations—which exacerbate their constant money problems—only to witness Michael bearing the awful legacy. Each chapter is told by one of the family’s five voices, shifting the point of view on shared troubles, showing how they grow away from one another without losing touch, how they cope with the loss of John and the challenge of Michael. Haslett (Union Atlantic, 2009, etc.) shapes these characters with such sympathy, detail, and skill that reading about them is akin to living among them. The portrait of Michael stands out: a clever, winning youth who becomes a kind of scholar of contemporary music with an empathy for black history and a wretched dependence on Klonopin and many other drugs to keep his anxiety at bay, to glimpse a “world unfettered by dread.”
As vivid and moving as the novel is, it’s not because Haslett strives to surprise but because he’s so mindful and expressive of how much precious life there is in both normalcy and anguish.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-26135-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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Although the author acknowledges in a postscript that his story is perhaps “too episodic,” his life of Sam Hell is inspiring...
Quite a departure from Dugoni’s dark novels about Detective Tracy Crosswhite (The Trapped Girl, 2017, etc.): the frankly inspirational tale of a boy who overcomes the tremendous obstacles occasioned by the color of his eyes.
Samuel James Hill is born with ocular albinism, a rare condition that makes his eyes red. Dubbed “the devil boy” by his classmates at Our Lady of Mercy, the Catholic school his mother, Madeline, fights to get him into, he faces loneliness, alienation, and daily ridicule, especially from David Freemon, a merciless bully who keeps finding new ways to torment him, and Sister Beatrice, the school’s principal and Freemon’s enabler, who in her own subtler ways is every bit as vindictive as he is. Only the friendship of two other outsiders, African-American athlete Ernie Cantwell and free-spirited nonconformist Michaela Kennedy, allows him to survive his trying years at OLM. In high school, Sam finds that nearly every routine milestone—the tryouts for the basketball team, the senior prom, the naming of the class valedictorian—represents new challenges. Even Sam’s graduation is blasted by a new crisis, though this one isn’t rooted in his red eyes. Determined to escape from the Bay Area suburb of Burlingame, he finds himself meeting the same problems, often embodied in the very same people, over and over. Yet although he rejects his mother’s unwavering faith in divine providence, he triumphs in the end by recognizing himself in other people and assuming the roles of the friends and mentors who helped bring him to adulthood. Dugoni throws in everything but a pilgrimage to Lourdes, and then adds that trip as well.
Although the author acknowledges in a postscript that his story is perhaps “too episodic,” his life of Sam Hell is inspiring and aglow with the promise of redemption.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-4900-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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