A story that effectively anatomizes the selfishness of grief despite a descent into sentimentality.
In Wells’ (Mademoiselle Renoir à Paris, 2018, etc.) novel, a dysfunctional family struggles to cope with a death.
“There never has been much happiness in the world,” says mother of three Jewell Hendricks, one of multiple narrators in this novel. In the fall of 1964, the Hendricks family has been in Dallas for 18 months after a move that Jewell instigated but now regrets. She wanted her husband, Ross, to get a more stable job, but now that he’s home more often, his heavy drinking has become more apparent. He’s never gotten over his World War II experience, and he suffers from nightmares and bouts of erratic, mean behavior. The household also includes 14-year-old Holly and 13-year-old Jake; the eldest child, 20-year-old Kathleen, is already married and lives elsewhere. Jake’s birth delighted Ross, who always wanted a son; he later becomes obsessed with Jake’s going to West Point and becoming a commissioned officer. Holly is always fighting for parental attention, although ever since she contracted polio, Ross has tried to please her. However, when Jake falls ill and dies, the family falls apart: “We were the unhappiest family I knew of,” narrates Holly, “each of us journeying through the darkness alone.” Holly, angry and forlorn, is sent to stay with her grandmother for the summer, where an African-American caretaker named Antarctica passes on “little seeds of wisdom” that help change Holly’s perspective and give her new hope. In this novel, Wells describes a tragedy that doesn’t draw family members closer together but instead sends them whirling into their own private hells—each person sure that he or she has it the worst. The resulting character sketches are convincing throughout, and the prose can be lyrical at times: “The world was too beautiful for the way I felt,” says Jewell in a scene set in springtime. The novel’s ending, however, is rather precious in tone, and it relies on a tired stock character—a person of color whose special insights aid the white protagonist: “She had come into my life at a time when I needed her most.”
A story that effectively anatomizes the selfishness of grief despite a descent into sentimentality.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945805-53-0
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Bedazzled Ink Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A celebratory song of the sea.
A shrimpy 13-year-old with a super-sized passion for marine life comes of age during a summer of discovery on the tidal flats of Puget Sound.
Miles O’Malley—Squid Boy to his friends—doesn’t mind being short. It’s other things that keep him awake at night, like his parents’ talk of divorce and his increasingly lustful thoughts about the girl next door. Mostly, though, it’s the ocean’s siren call that steals his sleep. During one of his moonlit kayak excursions, Miles comes across the rarest sighting ever documented in the northern Pacific: the last gasp of a Giant Squid. Scientists are stunned. The media descend. As Miles continues to stumble across other oddball findings, including two invasive species that threaten the eco-balance of Puget Sound, a nearby new-age cult’s interest in Miles prompts a headline in USA Today: Kid Messiah? Soon tourists are flocking to the tidal flats, crushing crustaceans underfoot and painting their bodies with black mud. Dodging disingenuous journalists, deluded disciples and the death-throes of his parents’ marriage, Miles tries to recapture some semblance of normality. He reads up on the G-spot and the Kama Sutra to keep pace with his pals’ bull sessions about sex (hilariously contributing “advanced” details that gross the other boys out). But Miles’s aquatic observations cannot be undone, and as summer draws to a close, inhabitants of Puget Sound prepare for a national blitzkrieg of media and scientific attention and the highest tide in 40 years, all of which threatens everything Miles holds dear. On land, the rickety plot could have used some shoring up. Miles is just too resourceful for the reader to believe his happiness—or that of those he loves—is ever at stake. But when Miles is on the water, Lynch’s first novel becomes a stunning light show, both literal, during phosphorescent plankton blooms, and metaphorical, in the poetic fireworks Lynch’s prose sets off as he describes his clearly beloved Puget Sound.
A celebratory song of the sea.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-605-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skilled and graceful exploration of the soul of an astonishing human being.
Full-immersion journalist Kidder (Home Town, 1999, etc.) tries valiantly to keep up with a front-line, muddy-and-bloody general in the war against infectious disease in Haiti and elsewhere.
The author occasionally confesses to weariness in this gripping account—and why not? Paul Farmer, who has an M.D. and a Ph.D. from Harvard, appears to be almost preternaturally intelligent, productive, energetic, and devoted to his causes. So trotting alongside him up Haitian hills, through international airports and Siberian prisons and Cuban clinics, may be beyond the capacity of a mere mortal. Kidder begins with a swift account of his first meeting with Farmer in Haiti while working on a story about American soldiers, then describes his initial visit to the doctor’s clinic, where the journalist felt he’d “encountered a miracle.” Employing guile, grit, grins, and gifts from generous donors (especially Boston contractor Tom White), Farmer has created an oasis in Haiti where TB and AIDS meet their Waterloos. The doctor has an astonishing rapport with his patients and often travels by foot for hours over difficult terrain to treat them in their dwellings (“houses” would be far too grand a word). Kidder pauses to fill in Farmer’s amazing biography: his childhood in an eccentric family sounds like something from The Mosquito Coast; a love affair with Roald Dahl’s daughter ended amicably; his marriage to a Haitian anthropologist produced a daughter whom he sees infrequently thanks to his frenetic schedule. While studying at Duke and Harvard, Kidder writes, Farmer became obsessed with public health issues; even before he’d finished his degrees he was spending much of his time in Haiti establishing the clinic that would give him both immense personal satisfaction and unsurpassed credibility in the medical worlds he hopes to influence.
Skilled and graceful exploration of the soul of an astonishing human being.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50616-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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