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PENELOPE'S HAT

A woman novelist—never certain who she and others are, both a product and an observer of the English middle class notorious for preferring appearances to the truth—kindles the imagination in Frame's haunting new novel (A Woman of Judah, 1989; Sandmouth, 1987; Winter Journey, 1986). Here, Frame covers the 1920's through the 80's. Styles and periods he is too young to have witnessed—including 1920's Borneo, a tennis club in 1930's Cornwall and wartime London—he captures with uncanny skill. His heroine is also a convincing period piece, with her taste for hats that both proclaim and conceal and with her need for a certain type of man to take her emotional life in charge. She wavers between being flesh and blood and an amalgam of the sensitive women who graced British drawing-room novels between the wars. Likewise, Frame's latest wavers between being an enormously clever parlor trick and literature of a more authentic kind. The author has some postmodern cards up his sleeve with his heroine writing books that obliquely refer to the life the reader has just read about, interviews by journalists with the heroine about why she writes and what she is trying to say, and mysterious, often melodramatic holes purposely left in the story to be filled in later or not at all. For Anglophiles, the book is a feast of the poetry of well-heeled English life—Harrod's, the Savoy, the Berkeley, holidays in France—and the very English poetry of good manners papering over emptiness, hatred and despair. Beautifully written, almost musical story of a woman's journey from childhood to old age trying to find clarity in a muffled world that makes its point by what it does not say.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991

ISBN: 0-671-72616-1

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991

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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

Life lessons.

Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

Pub Date: July 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-345-46750-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004

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THE VEGETARIAN

An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.

In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.

Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.

An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.

Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015

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