L’AMERICA

Name: L’AMERICA
Author: Martha McPhee
ISBN: 0-15-101171-0

by Martha McPhee ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 3, 2006

Ambitious and literate but also off-putting—everyone lives in a rarified atmosphere, the Americans as well as the Italians.

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McPhee (Gorgeous Lies, 2002) uses the star-crossed, cross-Atlantic affair of a young American woman and her Italian lover to muse on questions of national character and the power of history in individual lives.

Cesare grew up surrounded by wealth and family history in the Italian city where his ancestors have prospered for 500 years. Beth was raised unconventionally, first in a Pennsylvania commune begun by her eccentric father, then in her equally eccentric maternal grandmother’s Manhattan apartment. In 1982, Beth and Cesare meet while Beth is traveling in Europe before college. They fall rapturously in love, their passions enhanced by the attraction each feels for the other’s culture. Having learned through Cesare to speak, eat and dress Italian, Beth is often mistaken for an Italian later in life. For Cesare, who is in love with America from afar, particularly American literature, Beth is L’America. But Cesare is tied to his family’s heritage and to its expectations. Although Beth persuades him to visit her in America while she is studying at NYU, his future is already decided, and he lacks the will—or perhaps the desire—to change course. He recognizes that he is bound to his personal past in ways Beth is not. The more adventurous Beth stays in Italy for long stretches but ultimately cannot give up America and the ambitions she has been raised to pursue. She begins to view Cesare’s unwillingness to leave his family as a kind of laziness. Gradually, their relationship sours, then peters out. Each marries someone else, but they still long for each other until Beth dies in the World Trade Center bombing on 9/11. The author’s scattershot approach—she eschews a linear plot line—is initially distracting, then merely annoying.

Ambitious and literate but also off-putting—everyone lives in a rarified atmosphere, the Americans as well as the Italians.

Pub Date: April 3, 2006

ISBN: 0-15-101171-0

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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OMEGA FARM
by Martha McPhee

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AN ELEGANT WOMAN
by Martha McPhee

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DEAR MONEY
by Martha McPhee

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

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THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

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THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.