A Chinese-American's ambitious but flat first novel in which recent college graduate Ruby Lee comes home to face the family she fled. Settings, people, and activities (especially the preparation of remarkable meals) play prominent roles and are vividly and lovingly evoked. But that's not enough to carry a narrative that often seems an underpowered vehicle for characters whose problems feel more contrived than convincing. Ruby is confused about a lot of things: her sexual identity; her relationship with her parents, Bell and Franklin, and with her boyfriend Nick; as well as her reasons for coming home. While she was at Columbia, she rarely visited, even though her mother and father live in nearby Queens, where her father owns a laundry. Since childhood, Ruby has always felt protective of her mother, a quirky character who works in a garment factory, hoards food in the basement, and sews clothes for a granddaughter she's never seen. Ruby's parents sleep in separate rooms, and their relationship is also one of the issues that she's come home to resolve. She describes her father's trip to China to marry Bell; her parents' uneasy relations with her two siblings; and her own sexual needs and anxieties (she finds herself increasingly drawn to women), which have led to numerous panicky one-night-stands as well as an on-and-off relationship with Nick. As the months pass, Ruby intermittently works as a temp, saves to take her mother to Florida, and tries to understand her family. By fall, following a series of confrontations and revelations, she's finally able to move out, having accepted the tangled nature of family life and family history and its influence on her character, and having come to grips with her own sexuality. A coming-of-age story that pushes all the current multicultural buttons—cuisine, custom, and conflict between generations—but never truly comes alive. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-81416-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
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
A super-exorcism that leaves the taste of somebody else's blood in your mouth and what a bad taste it is. King presents us with the riddle of a small Maine town that has been deserted overnight. Where did all the down-Easters go? Matter of fact, they're still there but they only get up at sundown. . . for a warm drink. . . .Ben Mears, a novelist, returns to Salem's Lot (pop. 1319), the hometown he hasn't seen since he was four years old, where he falls for a young painter who admires his books (what happens to her shouldn't happen to a Martian). Odd things are manifested. Someone rents the ghastly old Marsten mansion, closed since a horrible double murder-suicide in 1939; a dog is found impaled on a spiked fence; a healthy boy dies of anemia in one week and his brother vanishes. Ben displays tremendous calm considering that you're left to face a corpse that sits up after an autopsy and sinks its fangs into the coroner's neck. . . . Vampirism, necrophilia, et dreadful alia rather overplayed by the author of Carrie (1974).
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1975
ISBN: 0385007515
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1975
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