An uneven collection from a writer who shows promise.
Five suburban step-families fall apart and reconnect in ten linked stories.
Pencil and paper ready? Here goes: Lu married Ward after Beatrix divorced him to marry Alan, who divorced Roxie to tie the knot. Moira married Ben after divorcing Tate, who now dates Roxie (see above). Tate’s sister Glynn, Moira’s ex-sister-in-law, married George. And then there are the kids: Liv, Alan and Roxie’s truculent, too-thin teenage daughter; Ward and Beatrix’s three sons: Devin, who refuses to speak in the presence of either parent, Britt, master of sarcasm, and Ollie, who cries; Ryan, Moira and Tate’s OCD handful, and Ashleigh, their 15-year-old sexpot (she dates Devin; see above); and Joey, Glynn’s son, who has more in common with Glynn’s new husband—especially a love of “Mortal Kombat” video games—than with her. Everyone lives nearby, in Oak Park, Ill. In the first three stories, “Loopy,” “Restoration” and “Ballad of the Barbie Feet,” YA novelist Ruby (Good Girls, Sept. 2006, etc.) begins to develop her many characters by moving a peripheral player from one story to the center in the next, and so on in the third. This deft technique deepens the stories’ competing personalities by letting the reader weigh the characters’ opinions about each other. Unfortunately, this daisy chain of narrative revelation breaks with the gimmicky fourth story, “Dear Psycho,” the collection’s weakest link. The remaining six stories, hampered by too many character sketches standing in for characters, are hit-or-miss: “Picture of Health” stretches so far out on one family tree’s limb—it introduces the girlfriend of a dead cousin—that its relevance to the whole fails to register. “Hug Machine” undermines Lu, otherwise the most appealing character of the lot. Only the title story, “I’m Not Julia Roberts,” in which a current and a former wife attempt to have an impossible conversation (think of the movie Stepmom), returns to the same storytelling élan of the opening three.
An uneven collection from a writer who shows promise.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2007
ISBN: 0-446-57874-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
Once again, Kl°ma (Judge on Trial, 1993, etc.) skillfully explores Prague life under the Communist regime in the trying years before the Velvet Revolution. This time around, Kl°ma offers six stories in which a writer (the author's afterword suggests it is the same writer throughout) finds himself working as everything from a courier to an archaeologist to a surveyor. Sometimes the writer finds pleasure in his new employment: In ``The Engine Driver's Story,'' he dreams of driving a locomotive, despite the fact that his ``non-existent psychoanalyst'' insists that the dream is not about trains but about missed opportunities. Sometimes he finds his new job distasteful: In ``The Smuggler's Story,'' he consoles himself with the fact that ``in the conditions prevailing here, it is rare for someone to be doing what he was trained to do, or what he is suited for'' as he struggles to outwit the police with three bags of contraband books. But the beauty of this particular collection (after all, these themes of conscience, oppression, and expression are par for the course with Kl°ma) lies in the sense of liberty and hope it offers when the writer reaps the unexpected benefits of new experiences. A talentless painter-by-default draws his first true likeness when he must identify a young girl he saw just before she committed suicide; an archaeologist interested in human origins finds the courage to admit (at least to himself) to hearing the voices of the home spirits in a 2,500-year-old burial ground. Few writers have the talent or insight to infuse old themes with new life when, according to Kl°ma's narrator, ``we have declared progress to be our idol'' so that ``the furious hunt for novelty [has become] diseased and self-destructive.'' But in this piercing, rich collection, Kl°ma does just that. A master delivers.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-684-19727-8
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
Inspired by the lyric fantastic, a first fiction collection from novelist Vaz (Saudade, 1994), this year's winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Vaz's tales rely often on the yeast of her songlike love for language, which can transform her prose, influenced by magic realism, into poetry. ``Sex happens,'' she writes in the title piece, ``the way a pearl is formed. It begins with a grain or parasitic worm that itches in the soft lining until the entire animal buckles around it.'' In ``Island Fever,'' Vaz displays her strong visual sense and her wit: ``The mouths in the crowd, including his wife's, were chattering like bivalve castanets.'' These 12 linked stories about Portuguese ÇmigrÇs from the Azores also rely on the force of improbable events to propel them forward. In ``The Remains of Princess Kaiulani's Garden,'' a laundress with extraordinary powers at the ironing board positively affects the lives of her customers: ``One old lady put on a skirt ironed by Elena and could do cartwheels. . . . A priest who had sent in his collars to be starched preached the best sermon of his life.'' Vaz can induce in a reader a fine and effusive rapture when her characters, inflamed, are carried skyward by their emotions. ``Math Bending Into Angels,'' in this vein, shows how love and an incurable spiritual hunger lead a woman to turn into an otherworldly sprite. In other tales dealing with more worldly matters, the writer's whimsy sometimes fails to persuade: an ease in Vaz's luscious lyricism can, in an earthly context, appear too pretty; with her head turned by metaphor, the author comes across as unable to take reality seriously. At such times, she lacks conviction in the primal logic of an unreasonable fate that guides the major magic realists. She's also more sentimental than they, and her language can seem contrived, lacking a fundamental emotional connection with the lives she describes. Still, when the theme of a story is in balance with its style, the result is elating.
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1997
ISBN: 0-8229-4051-5
Page Count: 169
Publisher: Univ. of Pittsburgh
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
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