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MEMOIRS OF LETICIA VALLE

Name: MEMOIRS OF LETICIA VALLE
Author: Rosa Chacel
ISBN: 0-8032-1456-1

by Rosa Chacel ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1994

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First published in 1945 and now making its US debut: in luminous prose, an elliptical tale of seduction from one of Spain's leading women writers. Set between the wars in provincial Spain, the story is related by an 11-year-old girl who, while precocious in vocabulary, is still a child in understanding, which makes her seduction by her tutor quite credible. This ``inconceivable act'' is recalled a year later because the narrator, now separated from everything she worshipped—``as if those things had hurt me''—decides to write everything down ``so they will never be erased in my memory.'' The only daughter of a man badly wounded fighting in Africa—her mother's absence is never fully explained—she lives with her father and aunt. An observant child, she determines the cause of her father's slurred speech by daily measuring the household cognac. The family moves to the small town of Simancas, a place where her father ``could get some fresh air without having to make such an effort.'' Here, Leticia attends embroidery classes given by the local mistress, puzzles over her father and aunt's unease, and explores the town, but it is her meeting with Donna Luisa that will transform her life. A young mother and musician, Donna Luisa has a quality that Leticia calls ``worldly, which was nothing other than a perfect ease about everything in the world.'' The two become close friends, and it seems fitting that husband Daniel, the local archivist, tutor the young girl. It is her evolving relationship with Daniel that Leticia, limited by knowledge and experience, tries to understand and describe as it moves to its inevitable and desired consummation. A close read, but ultimately rich and rewarding in its sensitively nuanced evocation of awakening sexuality and passion. A notable debut.

Pub Date: March 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-8032-1456-1

Page Count: 200

Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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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.