An entertaining appreciation of one woman's journey, sometimes ribald and funny, sometimes ironic and self-deprecating.
Marina Lucero reads the Dalai Lama, ponders Gandhi and yearns for inner peace. What she has is a challenging and needy family and a demanding and clueless set of friends.
Thirty-something Marina, a San Fernando Valley schoolteacher, had a mother who joined a Carmelite cloister when Marina was a child and a father who drank. Marina remains a bit resentful about her childhood, at least when her extended Hispanic family allows her time to think about it. There's older sister Della and her aimless dyslexic son Kiko. There's younger sister Xochi and her hapless sometime boyfriend Reggie. Then there is Rudy, Marina's former boyfriend, who thinks a failed relationship should provide fringe benefits. Marina does love Rudy's daughter, Letty, whom Marina mothered into adulthood. Letty's new baby, little Rudy, is hospitalized and mortally ill. Marina must rush to the aid of Letty and her husband, Miguel, a recovering drug addict, because that's what Marina does. She is a motherly caretaker, a woman constantly dancing between fatigue and self-imposed obligation. The book finds Marina teaching summer school, coping with Kiko and Reggie, both living on her couches, and providing intermittent refuge for Carlotta, her sweet next-door neighbor who is a punching bag for her out-of-work husband. Little Rudy dies, Letty attempts suicide, Carlotta is knocked into a hospital bed by her husband and Rudy demands that Marina give a false legal deposition so that his friend, Nestor, a Santeria priest, a voodoo babalawo, can escape child support payments. While dealing with these "hungry spirits," Marina generates romantic sparks with Carlos Lozano, an attractive and intelligent art teacher, and Arturo Ortiz, a nervous and engaging young doctor finishing his residency. López (Homicide Survivors Picnic and Other Stories, 2009, etc.) imagines believable characters and observes their world with literary insight.
An entertaining appreciation of one woman's journey, sometimes ribald and funny, sometimes ironic and self-deprecating.Pub Date: May 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-446-54963-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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