Redemption Lite.
Searching for the husband who disappeared on the eve of their 25th wedding anniversary, an obese woman changes her life.
The mystery in Lansens’s follow-up to The Girls (2006) is not why long-suffering Gooch left but what took him so long. Four-hundred-pound Mary has pushed him away for years, distrusting and refusing every gesture of affection. She has been under the sway of what she calls “the obeast” since childhood; she and Gooch fell in love as seniors in high school, after a parasitic infection caused a sudden weight loss. A gifted writer, Gooch gave up his college dreams to marry Mary when she became pregnant. But she miscarried before the wedding, her weight returned, and it increased even more once she learned she could not have children. For years Gooch has tried to interest Mary in the larger world, or in himself, but her only passion has been food. He goes missing after depositing $25,000 from a scratch-and-win lottery game into their joint checking account. Devastated, she is finally galvanized to leave their small Ontario hometown to look for him. Serendipitous events follow. Restaurant receipts lead her to Toronto, where she finds Gooch’s long-lost sister, who says he’s headed to see his estranged mother in Golden Hills, Calif. On the curb outside LAX, a kindly limo driver picks up Mary and arranges a salon makeover before dropping her at her mother-in-law’s house. Gooch isn’t there, but while waiting for him in California Mary befriends a divorcee with triplets and a hunky Mexican-American gardener. She warms to Gooch’s prickly mother, whose revelations force Mary to reexamine her marriage. Meanwhile, she loses her appetite. By the time she accepts that Gooch may not return, she is svelte and eating only for the right reasons. Readers will still be hungry: While Mary’s evolution is all too predictable, Lansens never adequately explains the more enigmatic, sympathetic Gooch.
Redemption Lite.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-06931-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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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