A slender, overplotted account of finding emotional peace.
Is Mia’s best friend, Lorrie Ann, really a better but unluckier version of Mia herself? That's the question in this debut novel about the journey from girlhood to womanhood.
Friends since they were children, Mia and Lorrie Ann are opposite sides of the same coin: “We were both smart, but Lorrie Ann was contemplative where I was wily, she earnest and I shrewd. Where she was sentimental, I became sarcastic.” Growing up in the eponymous Californian neighborhood in the 1990s, narrator Mia constantly measures herself negatively against her friend with the perfect family. Lorrie Ann loyally helps 15-year-old Mia when she needs an abortion, but a few years later, after Lorrie Ann herself becomes pregnant, she makes a different decision—to marry the father, Jim, and have the baby. After a difficult labor, the child is born with cerebral palsy; and then Jim, who joins the Army partly to cover his family’s medical bills, is killed in Iraq, leaving Lorrie Ann to struggle not only with money and child care, but drugs too. Meanwhile, Mia, still thinking of herself as black-hearted compared to her lovely friend, has gone to Yale, then graduate school, and found a wonderful partner in Franklin, a classics scholar like herself. The two girlfriends meet again years later in Istanbul, after Lorrie Ann has lost her suffering child to foster care and has become a heroin addict while Mia has just discovered she might be pregnant and is unsure whether to tell Franklin, who has said that he doesn’t want children. Thorpe brings sensitivity to her well-trodden terrain of female friendship and dilemmas of choice, but Mia’s journey of discovery about herself and her “opposite twin” feels excessively binary.
A slender, overplotted account of finding emotional peace.Pub Date: July 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-35196-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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