Brown revisits the Winstons of her debut, The Shirt Off His Back (2001); the tight-knit family must once again battle queen bitch Catherine Hawkins.
Seven years ago, Catherine fought Terry Winston for child custody (really just a ploy to improve her image—yes, the woman’s that cold). She lost and has rarely seen her twin girls Alisa and Ariana since. Having raised the girls single-handedly since their birth, Terry is now married to Jackie, and the family includes her twins and Terry and Jackie’s own son. They are a happy, prosperous African-American family in Dallas, but just wait until Catherine gets back on the scene to ruin everything. In the intervening years she has parlayed her business success into a multinational empire, backstabbing and dirty dealing all the way into an L.A. mansion, a private jet and boy toys at the ready. But now Catherine needs a kidney transplant, and while money can’t cure her, her daughters can. She shows up on the girls’ prom night to share the special occasion, but really to see which of the two she can manipulate into becoming a donor. Proud, furious Alisa speaks her mind, but softer Ariana agrees to become a donor, secretly hoping that this act of filial selflessness will inspire Catherine’s love. Fat chance, and everyone knows it (especially outraged Jackie), but it can’t be denied that Ariana’s kindness is inspiring. A few subplots are tossed into the drama: Catherine is planning on major layoffs and outsourcing, making a couple of dangerous enemies, and Jackie, feeling less than the mother she’s always been to the girls, suspects that Catherine may have secrets that could further damage the family. Though the writing lacks subtlety and the plot is a soap opera told in broad strokes—Catherine is BAD, Terry is GOOD—Brown does offer some keen insight in her depiction of Jackie: conflicted, jealous and devoted to keeping her family together. When it’s discovered that Ariana has a malformed kidney, Catherine’s salvation rests on Alisa’s shoulders—will she come through for her much-hated mother?
A guilty-pleasure page-turner despite its obvious flaws.Pub Date: May 30, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46945-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
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Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in white society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her white persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
High-stakes weepmeister Sparks (A Walk to Remember, 1999, etc.) opts for a happy ending his fourth time out. His writing has improved—though it's still the equivalent of paint-by-numbers—and he makes use this time of at least a vestige of credible psychology.
That vestige involves the deep dark secret—it has something to do with his father's death when son Taylor was nine—that haunts kind, good 36-year-old local contractor Taylor McAden and makes him withdraw from relationships whenever they start getting serious enough to maybe get permanent. He's done this twice before, and now he does it again with pretty and sweet single mother Denise Holton, age 29, who's moved from Atlanta to Taylor's town of Edenton, North Carolina, in order to devote her time more fully to training her four-year-old son Kyle to overcome the peculiar impediment he has that keeps him from achieving normal language acquisition. Okay? When Denise has a car accident in a bad storm, she's rescued by volunteer fireman Taylor—who also rescues little Kyle after he wanders away from his injured mom in the storm. Love blooms in the weeks that follow—until Taylor suddenly begins putting on the brakes. What is it that holds him back, when there just isn't any question but that he loves Denise and vice versa-not to mention that he's "great" with Kyle, just like a father? It will require a couple of near-death experiences (as fireman Taylor bravely risks his life to save others); emotional steadiness from the intelligent, good, true Denise; and the terrible death of a dear and devoted friend before Taylor will come to the point at last of confiding to Denise the terrible memory of how his father died—and the guilt that's been its legacy to Taylor. The psychological dam broken, love will at last be able to flow.
More Hallmarkiana, from a shameless expert in the genre.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2000
ISBN: 0-446-52550-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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