An overly earnest portrait of one mother’s suffering.
Dead child, cheating husband, stalking, mental breakdowns, misunderstood immigrants—few melodramatic prompts go unexplored in this tale of domestic woe.
Laura, the narrator of the sixth novel by Doughty (Fires in the Dark, 2004, etc.), is suffering from two emotional catastrophes. The first is the collapse of her marriage to David, who left her for one of his co-workers. The second, and most devastating, comes a few years later, when their 9-year-old daughter, Betty, is killed in a car accident in their quiet British town. Doughty structures the story by bouncing back and forth in time to cover Laura’s mental state before and after the accident. In doing so, she draws out the occasional keen observation about husbands and wives and mothers and daughters. But the novel is also saddled with bland characters and plot turns that are unengaging when they don’t defy credulity. In one thread running through the story, Laura struggles to identify the author of a series of intimidating and taunting anonymous messages, but its resolution is unsurprising and ultimately irrelevant to the story. Another subplot involves the anti-immigrant sentiment that pervades the town, focused on the Albanian man driving the car that killed Betty; in time the connection between him and Laura becomes closer, but then grows unconvincing and absurd. The novel was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Costa Book Award, presumably on the strength of its portrait of grief—in its more meditative moments, Laura’s feelings of shellshock are powerful, and her recollection of the day of Betty’s death is turned with agonizingly patient prose. But such moments are overwhelmed by ungainly police-procedural touches, and the novel’s shifts between the past and present sap its momentum.
An overly earnest portrait of one mother’s suffering.Pub Date: March 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-209466-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
Simmering with tension, this tragic, albeit imperfect, mystery is sure to keep readers inching off their seats.
A forsaken family bound by grief still struggles to pick up the pieces 12 years after their mother’s death.
When famous author Gil Coleman sees “his dead wife standing on the pavement below” from a bookshop window in a small town on the southern coast of England, he follows her, but to no avail, and takes a near-fatal fall off a walkway on the beach. As soon as they hear word of his accident, Gil’s grown daughters, Nan and Flora, drop everything and return to their seaside family home in Spanish Green. Though her father’s health is dire, Flora, Gil’s youngest, can’t help but be consumed by the thought that her mother, Ingrid—who went missing and presumably drowned (though the body was never found) off the coast more than a decade ago—could be alive, wandering the streets of their town. British author Fuller’s second novel (Our Endless Numbered Days, 2015) is nimbly told from two alternating perspectives: Flora’s, as she re-evaluates the loose ends of her mother’s ambiguous disappearance; and Ingrid’s, through a series of candid letters she writes, but never delivers, to Gil in the month leading up to the day she vanishes. The most compelling parts of this novel unfold in Ingrid’s letters, in which she chronicles the dissolution of her 16-year marriage to Gil, beginning when they first meet in 1976: Gil is her alluring professor, they engage in a furtive love affair, and fall into a hasty union precipitated by an unexpected pregnancy; Gil gains literary fame, and Ingrid is left to tackle motherhood alone (including two miscarriages); and it all bitterly culminates in the discovery of an irrevocable betrayal. Unbeknownst to Gil and his daughters, these letters remain hidden, neglected, in troves of books throughout the house, and the truth lies seductively within reach. Fuller’s tale is eloquent, harrowing, and raw, but it’s often muddled by tired, cloying dialogue. And whereas Ingrid shines as a protagonist at large, the supporting characters are lacking in depth.
Simmering with tension, this tragic, albeit imperfect, mystery is sure to keep readers inching off their seats.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-941040-51-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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