Half a Heart is anything but half-hearted. We feel we can trust Brown's integrity and compassion; that's why her fiction,...
The volatile relationship between a fortysomething Houston matron and the racially mixed daughter who hesitantly reenters her life is central to Brown's intelligent, affecting, if occasionally slow-moving fifth novel (and first since Before and After, 1992).
Miriam Starobin's embattled tenure as an idealistic teacher of history in Mississippi in the late 1960s climaxed when she gave birth to Veronica, fathered by Miriam's black colleague Eljay Reece, a militant music scholar who then contrived to keep the baby and drive Miriam away. Seventeen years later, when Miriam's comfortable marriage (to prosperous ophthalmologist Barry Vener) and motherhood (of their three children) begin to chafe against her half-guilty memories of Mississippi, `Ronnee`—now college-bound, and brimful of barely contained anger toward both the unsupportive Eljay and the unknown mother who `abandoned` her—arrives for a tense reunion, first at the Veners' New Hampshire summer property, then back in Houston, where Miriam's hopes that she can make her `other daughter` belong are cruelly tested. Brown handles this potentially preachy material better that almost anyone else writing today. Her style is a carefully judged blending of almost reportorial flatness with vividly rendered (restrained and overflowing) emotion, graced by frequent flashes of perceptive metaphor (Ronnee experiences everyday racism `like a chronic low-grade illness that sometimes flared up`; the charismatic Eljay basks in the `admiration of everyone . . . especially the women . . . [which] circled him like a string of little flashing lights`). Brown's scrupulous analyses of both her protagonists' believably crowded and confused emotions is impressively alert to the subtlest gradations of feeling, thought, and principle, and she makes us believe that all her people are tightly focused, exhausted decent people doing their fallible best to comprehend one another's `worlds.`
Half a Heart is anything but half-hearted. We feel we can trust Brown's integrity and compassion; that's why her fiction, even when (as here) it's intermittently redundant and overexplicit, never fails to grip us.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-29987-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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