It's easy to see why this caustic, cleareyed novel—Montero's English-language debut—was a bestseller in Spain four years after Franco's death in 1975. It offers a woman's view of a society in transition from dictatorship to democracy, and breaks the taboos on talk about abortion, contraception, virginity, gay sex, and orgasms real or faked. Ana, the protagonist, is a single mother and free-lance journalist with a crush on her boss, a smug publishing magnate with a growing empire. Her friend Candela is a single mother and psychologist in love with a married man. Their pal Cecilio is a gay architect in love with a string of adolescent hustlers who break his heart. Gay men and straight women struggle to reinvent themselves in the new post-Franco society. They haven't a clue how to do it, but at least they're alive; they feel—mostly pain—and they have a sense of humor and solidarity. Meanwhile, straight men, whether climbers or dropouts, secure in the leading roles machismo still assigns them, continue to sleepwalk through life. Montero's women are not on the verge of nervous breakdown but in a perpetual slow boil. The narrative glides, diary-like, through a year in the life of Ana and her circle: underpaid work, pub crawls, parties, divorce, cancer, suicide, and anomie have replaced the waves of repression and rebellion that gave shape to the late Franco years. A disillusioned communist, a drunken civil-war anarchist, a Basque separatist destroyed by prison and torture, a band of pathetic belated hippies—all make their appearance. Sociologically fascinating but, as literature, predictable. The isolation of each from each is irremediable, except perhaps through art; and, in the end, Ana gives up on love and decides to write a book instead: the one we've just been reading. A tidy ending for a sometimes daring, sometimes timid account of social upheaval in late 20th-century Europe.
Pub Date: Dec. 5, 1991
ISBN: 0-8032-3141-5
Page Count: 189
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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