A unique, occasionally heartbreaking tale that offers a sliver of hope.
An automobile accident on New York City’s FDR Drive forever changes the lives of two families and forces a cultural clash between Manhattan’s upper-class Anglos and its immigrant Hispanic underclass.
Altschuler’s (Invisible Chains, 2012) second novel is ambitious in its scope, dealing with both the personal journey of rediscovery by a middle-aged woman and the legal minefields faced by undocumented immigrants. Additionally, it raises the provocative issue of using immigrants held in detention to staff sweatshop factories. The drama begins when Roisin Casey—wife, mother of two, professional manager in a pharmaceutical firm and comfortable member of Manhattan’s advantaged social and economic class—becomes momentarily distracted and swerves her car into a rather dilapidated truck driven by Juan Rodriguez, an undocumented immigrant and member of the city’s working poor. Wracked with guilt when Juan is arrested for having an expired driver’s license and learning that he faces deportation, Roisin feels compelled to help Juan’s wife and infant son. In the process, she finds she can no longer contain the growing dissatisfaction and emotional turmoil that has been roiling beneath the surface of her safe, exceedingly orderly life. The steps she takes to befriend Juan’s wife, Lourdes, threaten her own marriage and profoundly shake her family. The narrative is relayed through the alternating perspectives of the primary characters: Roisin, Juan, Lourdes, Juan’s brother Angel and, to a lesser extent, Roisin’s son, Warren. Altschuler is prone to exaggerating the good, the indifferent and the nasty in her characterizations, but her story is compelling and important. Unfortunately, the message is undermined by sloppy punctuation, which a solid copy edit could easily repair. Throughout the work, for example, the use of quotation marks is totally capricious. Often there are opening quotes but no closing quotes; sometimes there are no quotation marks at all. This oversight becomes even more confusing because characters frequently do not express their thoughts out loud, making it important to indicate when they are actually speaking. In such a compelling story, readers are likely to forgive a few errors, but another copy edit is still essential.
A unique, occasionally heartbreaking tale that offers a sliver of hope.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491810767
Page Count: 222
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Thoroughbreds and Virginia blue-bloods cavort, commit murder, and fall in love in Roberts's (Hidden Riches, 1994, etc.) latest romantic thriller — this one set in the world of championship horse racing. Rich, sheltered Kelsey Byden is recovering from a recent divorce when she receives a letter from her mother, Naomi, a woman she has believed dead for over 20 years. When Kelsey confronts her genteel English professor father, though, he sheepishly confesses that, no, her mother isn't dead; throughout Kelsey's childhood, she was doing time for the murder of her lover. Kelsey meets with Naomi and not only finds her quite charming, but the owner of Three Willows, one of the most splendid horse farms in Virginia. Kelsey is further intrigued when she meets Gabe Slater, a blue-eyed gambling man who owns a neighboring horse farm; when one of Gabe's horses is mated with Naomi's, nostrils flare, flanks quiver, and the romance is on. Since both Naomi and Gabe have horses entered in the Kentucky Derby, Kelsey is soon swept into the whirlwind of the Triple Crown, in spite of her family's objections to her reconciliation with the notorious Naomi. The rivalry between the two horse farms remains friendly, but other competitors — one of them is Gabe's father, a vicious alcoholic who resents his son's success — prove less scrupulous. Bodies, horse and human, start piling up, just as Kelsey decides to investigate the murky details of her mother's crime. Is it possible she was framed? The ground is thick with no-goods, including haughty patricians, disgruntled grooms, and jockeys with tragic pasts, but despite all the distractions, the identity of the true culprit behind the mayhem — past and present — remains fairly obvious. The plot lopes rather than races to the finish. Gambling metaphors abound, and sexual doings have a distinctly equine tone. But Roberts's style has a fresh, contemporary snap that gets the story past its own worst excesses.
Pub Date: June 13, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14059-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
