Lively, illuminatingly exotic and richly told tale of life during wartime.
Groves’ debut historical novel, set in mid–20th-century Japan, is a well-tempered story of cultural dislocation, the ruin of war and faith in love.
The author has created an epic here, but it is of the intimate rather than the sprawling variety. The book opens in the 1930s when a young man, Jiro, is sent to San Francisco on a work-study program to learn the American end of his family’s silk business. The story moves back and forth between those months in the United States and Jiro’s life in Kyoto, two very different experiences. As Japan invades China and a more expansive war looms, the book illuminates the importance of gardens in Japan, as well as bathing rituals and fried squid. Despite being minutely plotted, the narrative offers many unforced insights into Japanese culture, drawing some fiercely dark moments and cushioning others with light humor: “Its driver was sitting on the front, oblivious to the uplifted tail of his one-horsepower machine and the straw-filled remains of the day the swaybacked nag was depositing on the pavement.” When Jiro becomes a fighter pilot, the novel offers readers an entertaining tour of the Zero aircraft, later describing in stunning detail the action of aerial dogfights. With equal flair, the author draws a lovely wedding and outlines the workings of sericulture. There is much death and intolerance here, but readers will find balance in Jiro, whose proud Japanese personality is slightly beveled by his Western sojourn. In the end, Jiro does not rue surviving the war; others who chose suicide didn’t realize that “the Americans weren’t going to invade Japan, just occupy her. This meant they would not rape and kill their women, just marry them.”
Lively, illuminatingly exotic and richly told tale of life during wartime.Pub Date: July 25, 2011
ISBN: 9781604819120
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Wordclay
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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