A too-familiar story about the plight of working moms that lacks ingenuity and emotion.
Suburban mom trades the jungle gym for the urban jungle.
In her prior life as a publicist, Julia Einstein kept the company of A-list celebrities. For the past three years, she’s been playing house in the New York suburbs. She’s a devoted mother who spends her days whipping up macaroni and cheese and organizing play dates. This predictable and sweet existence changes when Julia’s husband, Peter, is sacked from his job. When the severance pay dries up, Julia reluctantly takes a job with a second-rate publicity firm shepherding the comeback of Mary Ford, a surly has-been. Once a marquee name, actress Mary Ford is now 70 years old and starving for attention. Mary’s latest stab at stardom involves launching “Legend,” a dreadful perfume. If Julia can manage to drum up interest in Mary and this new fragrance, she’ll get her career back on track and keep her family solvent. In a classic story of role reversal (think Mr. Mom), Julia is forced to don stockings and heels and resume her career, while Peter tends to the household matters. As Julia experiences a rocky transition into the working world, things are equally confusing at home. Julia feels like she’s been replaced—Peter’s a better mom than she ever was. A model of efficiency, Peter takes a shine to gourmet cooking and household management. Jealous of his abilities, Julia feels completely isolated. Zigman (Her, 2002, etc.) knows how to develop a plot, but her heroine never becomes sympathetic. Generally disgruntled, she has too many sharp edges: Her relationships are brittle and her mundane interactions border on hostile. And it feels like an eternity before she displays any real skill at her job.
A too-familiar story about the plight of working moms that lacks ingenuity and emotion.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2006
ISBN: 0-446-57838-X
Page Count: 296
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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