Another pleasant jaunt down a genealogical rabbit hole.
Third in Riley’s Seven Sisters series (The Storm Sister, 2016, etc.) about adopted daughters in search of their ancestry.
Star, real name Asterope after one of the “seven sisters” of the Pleiades star cluster, has, upon the recent death of her adoptive father, a wealthy Swiss seafarer, returned to her childhood chateau on Lake Geneva to retrieve his legacy to her: a figurine of a black panther, the address of a bookshop in London, and a name, Flora MacNichol. Star has given up dreams of academe to stay close to sister CeCe in London—so symbiotic is their relationship that Star has always been known as CeCe’s shadow. Star visits the bookshop, whose eccentric proprietor, Orlando Forbes, comes from impoverished nobility. When she learns that Flora, her presumed ancestor, may be related to Orlando, she accompanies him to the family seat, High Weald, in Kent, where she meets Orlando’s truculent brother Mouse, their cousin Marguerite Vaughan, and her young son Rory, heir to the estate. Star is immediately drawn to the crumbling hall and the surrounding flora and fauna. She consults journals she finds in the mansion and learns that in 1909, Flora gave up her true love, Archie, Lord Vaughan, to her younger sister Aurelia. For reasons not immediately revealed, Aurelia is the repository of her landed but cash-poor family’s hopes and limited resources, while Flora is treated like a stepchild despite her beauty and talent. (Flora is an animal lover and budding naturalist who will later become a protégé of Beatrix Potter.) After her parents sell their beloved country home to fund Aurelia’s dowry, Flora is sent to live with Mrs. Keppel, a society grand dame rumored to be King Edward’s mistress. With Mrs. Keppel’s help, Flora seems slated for an advantageous but loveless match to a drunken earl. The frame story structure serves this installment well—the past and present narratives are equally engaging. The storytelling is leisurely, almost to excess, then suddenly the stakes heighten as the Forbes-Vaughan connection is illuminated and Star discovers her true heritage and destiny.
Another pleasant jaunt down a genealogical rabbit hole.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5994-4
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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