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Moore's (Like Life, 1990, etc.) account of a disillusioned American in Paris recounting a childhood friendship feels like rereading a diary entry about that first middle-school dance—dreamy, tender, embarrassing, and endlessly enticing. (A shorter version of this book appeared previously in the New Yorker.) Berie Carr, a successful photography curator, has reached the point in life where social occasions demand that one speak of "one's upbringing and be amusing at the same time." No problem here. There's plenty of comic fodder in her parents (cold Baptists who took in foreign students, political exiles, and foster children), her hometown of Horsehearts, NY, (a typical small town, across the border from Quebec), her summer job (a ticket-taker at a two-bit amusement park called Storyland), and her long-awaited pubescence (the word "developed" filled her with dread; she avoided all dresses with darts). But now she and her philandering husband vacation in Paris, making Pépé LePew jokes as a brief respite from petty quarrels about where they are or where they're going: "the questions no longer just metaphorical but literal, replete with angry pointing and some disgusted grabbing of maps, right out of the other's hands." Berie looks for answers to the present by returning to the past. In Horsehearts, Silsby Chaussée, a beautiful girl who played Cinderella at Storyland, was Berie's best friend. The two smoked cigarettes together, used fake IDs to get into bars, stayed out all night, sneaked liquor from their parents' stashes—the usual stuff. But gradually, when Sils got breasts and then a boyfriend and then pregnant, she moved into a new world where Berie couldn't follow. Then, Berie went off to boarding school and college, and finally Sils was left behind. Sifting through these memories, Berie finds answers about love and kindness and hope that, even if they don't change her life, make it more livable. Moore's voice sings and soars in this perfect little book—too bad it ends so soon.
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NonePub Date: Oct. 3, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-43482-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A bold but flawed debut novel.
There’s a mystery, a coming-of-age, abundant melodrama and even more abundant medical lore in this idiosyncratic first novel from a doctor best known for the memoir My Own Country (1994).
The nun is struggling to give birth in the hospital. The surgeon (is he also the father?) dithers. The late-arriving OB-GYN takes charge, losing the mother but saving her babies, identical twins. We are in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1954. The Indian nun, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, was a trained nurse who had met the British surgeon Thomas Stone on a sea voyage ministering to passengers dying of typhus. She then served as his assistant for seven years. The emotionally repressed Stone never declared his love for her; had they really done the deed? After the delivery, Stone rejects the babies and leaves Ethiopia. This is good news for Hema (Dr. Hemalatha, the Indian gynecologist), who becomes their surrogate mother and names them Shiva and Marion. When Shiva stops breathing, Dr. Ghosh (another Indian) diagnoses his apnea; again, a medical emergency throws two characters together. Ghosh and Hema marry and make a happy family of four. Marion eventually emerges as narrator. “Where but in medicine,” he asks, “might our conjoined, matricidal, patrifugal, twisted fate be explained?” The question is key, revealing Verghese’s intent: a family saga in the context of medicine. The ambition is laudable, but too often accounts of operations—a bowel obstruction here, a vasectomy there—overwhelm the narrative. Characterization suffers. The boys’ Ethiopian identity goes unexplored. Shiva is an enigma, though it’s no surprise he’ll have a medical career, like his brother, though far less orthodox. They become estranged over a girl, and eventually Marion leaves for America and an internship in the Bronx (the final, most suspenseful section). Once again a medical emergency defines the characters, though they are not large enough to fill the positively operatic roles Verghese has ordained for them.
A bold but flawed debut novel.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-41449-7
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
PLB 0-688-13166-2 King Midas And The Golden Touch ($16.00; PLB $15.63; Apr.; 32 pp.; 0-688-13165-4; PLB 0-688-13166-2): The familiar tale of King Midas gets the golden touch in the hands of Craft and Craft (Cupid and Psyche, 1996). The author takes her inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s retelling, capturing the essence of the tale with the use of pithy dialogue and colorful description. Enchanting in their own right, the illustrations summon the Middle Ages as a setting, and incorporate colors so lavish that when they are lost to the uniform gold spurred by King Midas’s touch, the point of the story is further burnished. (Picture book. 7-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-13165-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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