Actress Hunt (Broadway star of Hair, mother of Mick Jagger's first child) follows two previous books (an autobiography published in England; a novel, Joy, 1991) with an old-fashioned race-and-sex melodrama set in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1913. Theodore ``Teenotchy'' Simms, 19 and black, works hard at cleaning house for the old Quaker he reveres—a man whose genuine concern is adulterated with self-interest and guilt—and at blocking out ugliness; Teenotchy's mostly repressed the childhood memory of witnessing his mother's rape and murder. But there's a lot he doesn't know: angry, hard-working Aunt Em, with whom he lives (who never considered herself a ``slave'' but rather a ``hostage''), is actually his grandmother; she bore his mother to the white master who later took sexual advantage of his own child. Meanwhile, Teenotchy's docile simplicity can't last after he takes a second job in the Tewksbury stables—he's a superb horseman—and meets visiting English aristocrat Alexander Blake. Alexander has romanticized black people ever since Uncle Tom's Cabin, and his uncertain sexual orientation comes clear as soon as he lays eyes on Teenotchy. This dangerous infatuation, in the midst of a virulently racist and homophobic society, may open the world to Teenotchy—or lead to disaster. Heavy-handed—but the 1913 setting provides some richness (the beginning of the modern era—a scant 50 years after Emancipation- -was not far, culturally, from the slavery era); the love/hate sexuality between master and slave is almost unbearably painful; and there's interest in seeing this familiar pulp material from an African-American perspective.
Pub Date: Jan. 6, 1993
ISBN: 0-525-93575-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
A fine first novel that enlivens familiar themes of parenthood and battles against nature.
A couple struggling to settle in the Alaskan wilderness is heartened by the arrival of the child of their dreams—or are they literally dreaming her?
Jack and Mabel, the protagonists of Ivey’s assured debut, are a couple in their early 50s who take advantage of cheap land to build a homestead in Alaska in the 1920s. But the work is backbreaking, the winters are brutally cold and their isolation only reminds them of their childlessness. There’s a glimmer of sunshine, however, in the presence of a mysterious girl who lurks near their cabin. Though she’s initially skittish, in time she becomes a fixture in the couple's lives. Ivey takes her time in clarifying whether or not the girl, Faina, is real or not, and there are good reasons to believe she’s a figment of Jack and Mabel’s imaginations: She’s a conveniently helpful good-luck charm for them in their search for food, none of their neighbors seem to have seen the girl and she can’t help but remind Mabel of fairy tales she heard in her youth about a snow child. The mystery of Faina’s provenance, along with the way she brightens the couple’s lives, gives the novel’s early chapters a slightly magical-realist cast. Yet as Faina’s identity grows clearer, the narrative also becomes a more earthbound portrait of the Alaskan wilderness and a study of the hard work involved in building a family. Ivey’s style is spare and straightforward, in keeping with the novel’s setting, and she offers enough granular detail about hunting and farming to avoid familiar pieties about the Last Frontier. The book’s tone throughout has a lovely push and pull—Alaska’s punishing landscape and rough-hewn residents pitted against Faina’s charmed appearances—and the ending is both surprising and earned.
A fine first novel that enlivens familiar themes of parenthood and battles against nature.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-316-17567-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
When a book has such great comic timing, it's easy to finish the story in one sitting.
A toxic workplace nurtures an intoxicating romance in Lauren’s (The Unhoneymooners, 2019, etc.) latest.
Rusty and Melissa Tripp are the married co-hosts of a successful home-makeover show and have even published a book on marriage. After catching Rusty cheating on Melissa, their assistants, James McCann and Carey Duncan, are forced to give up long-scheduled vacations to go along on their employers' book tour to make sure their marriage doesn’t implode. And the awkwardness is just getting started. Stuck in close quarters with no one to complain to but each other, James and Carey find that the life they dreamed of having might be found at work after all. James learns that Carey has worked for the Tripps since they owned a humble home décor shop in Jackson, Wyoming. Now that the couple is successful, Carey has no time for herself, and she doesn’t get nearly enough credit for her creative contribution to their media empire. Carey also has regular doctor’s appointments for dystonia, a movement disorder, which motivates her to keep her job but doesn’t stop her from doing it well. James was hired to work on engineering and design for the show, but Rusty treats him like his personal assistant. He’d quit, too, but it’s the only job he can get since his former employer was shut down in a scandal. Using a framing device similar to that of Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies, the story flashes forward to interview transcripts with the police that hint at a dramatic ending to come, and the chapters often end with gossip in the form of online comments, adding intrigue. Bonding over bad bosses allows James and Carey to stick up for each other while supplying readers with all the drama and wit of the enemies-to-lovers trope.
When a book has such great comic timing, it's easy to finish the story in one sitting.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3864-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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