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ABSENT LOVE

Name: ABSENT LOVE
Author: Rosa Montero
ISBN: 0-8032-3141-5

A CHRONICLE

by Rosa Montero ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 5, 1991

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE LEGEND OF THE LADY SLIPPER

AN OJIBWE TALE

adapted by Lise Lunge-Larsen & Margi Preus ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1999

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Lunge-Larsen and Preus debut with this story of a flower that blooms for the first time to commemorate the uncommon courage of a girl who saves her people from illness. The girl, an Ojibwe of the northern woodlands, knows she must journey to the next village to get the healing herb, mash-ki- ki, for her people, who have all fallen ill. After lining her moccasins with rabbit fur, she braves a raging snowstorm and crosses a dark frozen lake to reach the village. Then, rather than wait for morning, she sets out for home while the villagers sleep. When she loses her moccasins in the deep snow, her bare feet are cut by icy shards, and bleed with every step until she reaches her home. The next spring beautiful lady slippers bloom from the place where her moccasins were lost, and from every spot her injured feet touched. Drawing on Ojibwe sources, the authors of this fluid retelling have peppered the tale with native words and have used traditional elements, e.g., giving voice to the forces of nature. The accompanying watercolors, with flowing lines, jewel tones, and decorative motifs, give stately credence to the story’s iconic aspects. (Picture book/folklore. 4-8)

Pub Date: March 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-395-90512-5

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SHOCK WAVE

by Clive Cussler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 2, 1996

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Cussler's most adult, least comic-strip-y entry yet in the Dirk Pitt sea sagas. Gone is the outlandish plotting of Treasure (1988), when Dirk found Cleopatra's barge in Texas, and of Sahara (199), which unearthed Lincoln's body in a Confederate sub—buried in the desert sands. Now, in his 11th outing, Dirk Pitt and his National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA) fight villainous megalomaniac Arthur Dorsett, head of Dorsett Consolidated Mining, which holds the world's wealthiest diamond-mine empire. Pitt and his team must fight as well Dorsett's three daughters, the coldly beauteous Amazonian Boudicca, whose giant strength dwarfs Dirk's; the elegant but heartless Deirdre; and the star-crossed zoologist Maeve, whose bastard twins are held captive by grandfather Arthur so that Maeve will infiltrate NUMA and report on its investigation of his holdings—even though Dirk recently saved Maeve and Deirdre's lives in the Antarctic. First, however, Cussler takes us back to 1856 and a typhoon-battered British clipper ship, the Gladiator, that sinks in uncharted seas off Australia; only eight survive, including Jess Dorsett "the highwayman," a dandyish-looking convict, who discovers raw diamonds when stranded on an uninhabited island. From this arises the Dorsett empire, bent on undermining the world market in diamonds by dumping a colossal backlog of stones and colored gems into its vast chain of jewelry stores and, with one blow, toppling De Beers and all rivals. Worse, Arthur Dorsett excavates by high-energy-pulsed ultrasound, and when ultrasound from all four of his island mines (one on Gladiator Island, near New Zealand, another by Easter Island, the last two in the North Pacific Ocean) happen to converge, a killer shock wave destroys all marine and human life for 30 kilometers around, and now threatens over a million people in Hawaii—unless Dirk Pitt's aging body can hold it back. Tireless mechanical nomenclature, but furious storytelling.