Since Hautman has excelled in both fairy tales and comic nightmares (Rag Man, 2001, etc.), he’s just the craftsman to plunk...
Yet another struggling businessman with romance in his heart and felony dogging his footsteps.
Talk about your cosmic justice. The day Nick Fashon finds out that his grandfather, reclusive inventor Caleb Hardy, has been found dead, his body nibbled by coyotes, is the same day that Love & Fashion, his clothing store, has burned to the ground, together with Nick’s uninsured apartment, his nine pairs of Bally shoes, and his collection of 500 Motown records. “Caleb had lost his life, but his stuff was okay. Nick had lost his stuff, but he was alive. Now he had new stuff,” muses the survivor, whose inheritance seems limited to Caleb’s crackpot prototypes—the Inch-Adder, the Comb-n-Clean, and all the rest of their uncommercial ilk. One item, though, seizes Nick’s fancy: the HandyMate, a kitchen gadget that slices, dices, and does everything else. Bent on bringing the enchanted chunk of plastic to market, Nick swiftly finds that although the HandyMate’s seized other fancies too—especially that of Caleb’s girlfriend Yola Fuente, the restaurateur who, claiming half ownership in the thingamabob, is determined to introduce it on her cooking program and run off with the proceeds—it leaves his impecunious partner, Vincent Love, cold, and stirs up nothing but trouble for Nick’s ladylove Gretchen Groth (Archaeology/Univ. of Arizona), whose demand that he not raise seed money from her ex-cop father Bootsie are matched by Bootsie’s demand that he take the money and make them both rich. A slippery insurance agent, a Tucson arson investigator, and an excitable loan shark are all on hand to drag Nick deeper into trouble.
Since Hautman has excelled in both fairy tales and comic nightmares (Rag Man, 2001, etc.), he’s just the craftsman to plunk his appealing hero into the middle of a tale so finely balanced that it could go either way right up to the end.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-0019-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
Young writer Yoshimoto's first full-length fiction to appear in the US—an excerpt of which appeared in New Japanese Voices (1991; ed. by Helen Mitsios)—explores love and loss with a distinctly contemporary sensibility. The source of what has been described as ``Bananamania'' in her native Japan, Yoshimoto combines traditional sensitivity to nuance and setting with a youthful sense of belonging to a wider, less specifically Japanese world—characters jog, eat Kentucky Fried chicken, and listen to American music: a combination that, apparently, made this novel—in reality two separate stories united by a theme of loss and survival—an instant success among younger Japanese. In the story of the title, the narrator Mikage has lost her last remaining relative, a beloved grandmother with whom she lived. Grieving, she finds comfort only in the apartment kitchen- -``the hum of the refrigerator kept me from thinking of my loneliness.'' An invitation by Yuichi, a fellow student and friend of her grandmother's, to move in temporarily with him and his mother, Eriko, is gladly accepted. Mikage, who declares she loves kitchens best—they are to her symbol of life and survival—falls immediately in love with the new kitchen. Generous and glamorous Eriko, actually a transvestite—she was Yuichi's father—makes her feel at home, and Mikage, a survivor, is soon on her feet with her own apartment and a job, cooking for a TV show. But when Eriko is murdered, Mikage is there with an effective mix of common sense and love to help the grieving Yuichi recover. The second (much shorter) story, ``Moonlight Shadow,'' lyrically describes the journey that a young woman and man—who've both lost their beloveds in an accident—make from debilitating grief through an almost dreamlike landscape in which the dead appear to an acceptance that life, a ``flowing river,'' must go on. Timeless emotions, elegantly evoked with impressive originality and strength.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8021-1516-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
Worthy of the acclaim given The Joy Luck Club, Tan's engrossing second novel about Chinese-American culture continues the author's intricate exploration of mother-daughter relationships, generational differences, and the key way secrets define them. Pearl, herself the mother of two girls, has not yet told her mother Winnie what she has known for a while—that she has multiple sclerosis (their relationship has been strained ever since Pearl's father died when she was 14). Aunt Helen, who knows Pearl's "secret," threatens to tell Pearl's mother if Pearl won't do it herself. Helen then makes the same threat to Winnie—reveal her secret past to her daughter or Helen will. So Winnie sits down and tells Pearl the story of her life before coming to America and before her marriage to the man Pearl thinks is her father—a life of hell spent with a deeply disturbed, sadistic first husband, Pearl's real father. It is a life that encapsulates a strong belief in fate and luck and, unfortunately, the oppressed role of women in Chinese culture—one that continually summons up the image of the title: a symbol of the wronged but ever-forgiving wife. In the sheer power of conveying Winnie's secret life in China, Tan once again demonstrates her truly gifted storytelling ability. (Pearl is a less interesting character, but then again so is life in contemporary California.) One can only admire Tan's talent for capturing and synthesizing the complex cultural dynamics at work here and turning them into such an intriguing, harrowing tale.
Pub Date: June 27, 1991
ISBN: 0143038109
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
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