A promising but uneven coming-of-age tale.
In this debut novel, a young, adopted woman repeats a painful legacy she does not know she has inherited.
Sixteen-year-old Julie lives in a rural fishing village in Newfoundland in 1950. She has a penchant for writing and an appreciation for the nature-rich environment that inspires her creativity. But Julie dreams of trading her quaint hometown life for one more replete with big-city ambitions. This dream becomes unexpectedly deferred after Julie has an affair with her married—and later angry—bakery boss that results in a pregnancy. Upon learning this, Julie’s parents take her to a convent in Nova Scotia that promises a discreet environment in which she can have her baby, give it up for adoption, and finish her high school studies. Julie—tortured but with little say in the matter—does just this. Flash forward 16 years to Julie’s daughter, a teenage Marina Cynthia, admiring the view of Manhattan from the picture window of her adoptive parents’ luxury apartment. Unlike Julie, Marina seems to have everything a young woman coming-of-age could ask for—brains, wealth, beauty, adoring parents, a loyal cousin and friend named Laurie, and an inherited passion for writing. Still, Marina, oblivious to her adoption history, has long harbored nagging questions about the lack of resemblance between herself and her parents. These questions resurface when Marina finds herself in a predicament similar to her biological mother’s situation more than a decade ago—pregnant at 16 with the child of an older man who abandons her. From here, Marina is unintentionally launched into the process of excavating the truth of her origin story. In this ambitious novel, Franceschini’s tenderness toward the plight of the adopted child and the transformative experience of teenage pregnancy is appreciable. Further, her central plot idea has intriguing dramatic potential. That said, the novel’s execution is a bit flawed. The prose sometimes delivers clichés (“Julie sat in the soft, brown chair…with her hands holding her head and tears flowing like a never-ending river”). In addition, the dialogue often has a stilted quality (Julie “uttered, in a strained voice, ‘Looks like nightfall is ending our time of bliss. We have to separate now…I hope I make it to college someday. I need to prepare for my future”). And emotional encounters are resolved as quickly and as smoothly as the plot moves, which makes for bland, unabsorbing reading.
A promising but uneven coming-of-age tale.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64544-080-2
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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