Neither funny nor insightful enough to rise above the crowd of similar plots.
Pennebaker’s first novel attempts to join the recession-hit chic-lit mini-boomlet with her comedy about an Austin, Texas, divorcée struggling to live under one roof with her adolescent daughter and aging mother.
About to turn 50, Joanie has still not fully adjusted to her divorce two years earlier from lawyer Richard. In fact, she’s sworn off sex all together. Given that this is supposedly a book about hard times, Joanie’s financial situation, even how much Richard is paying in child support, remains vague. After having unbelievably little trouble getting an ad-agency job after years as a stay-at-home mom, she evinces only disdain for the actual work, not to mention her much younger colleagues, and only limited concern over job security. Meanwhile, her personal life is one irritation after another. Her 15-year-old daughter Caroline has turned typically adolescent: impatient, hostile, secretive and mildly rebellious. Not so much unpopular as invisible to her high-school peers, Caroline experiments with cigarettes, pot and wildly dyed hair but remains basically a good girl. Joanie’s aging mother Ivy, who has had to leave her West Texas home and move in with Joanie for financial reasons, is outspoken in disparaging both daughter and granddaughter, and although she’s supposed to be a reactionary shrew, her criticism seems pretty accurate. Her intolerance covers aching loneliness, and the novel’s best scene occurs when Caroline and her only friend bake pot brownies that Ivy devours à la mode. As Ivy’s health fails, Joanie’s brother, Ivy’s blatant favorite, doesn’t visit or lift a finger to help. Richard announces that his much younger girlfriend is expecting a baby and then is out of town on business the rest of the novel. Pennebaker’s male characters are so undeveloped that even in their villainy they seem irrelevant. The novel’s one half-decent guy, Joanie’s co-worker, becomes a lukewarm love interest at best. Eventually, of course, female camaraderie is achieved among the three generations.
Neither funny nor insightful enough to rise above the crowd of similar plots.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-425-23856-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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