A cozy but flimsy mystery with an eccentric protagonist.
In CassanoLochman’s (Stranded on Thin Ice, 2017) thriller, a good-hearted older woman becomes involved in a criminal conspiracy.
Hattie Crumford is a chatty 62-year-old widow who describes herself as “a non-congealer with society…a clump of quirky personality floating with the rest of the population.” Having spent most of her adult life cooped up at home in a distant, childless marriage, she’s made it a point since her husband’s death to explore her native New Orleans. As the assistant to a private investigator, she never expects anything dramatic to happen to her. Then, one day, a strange man arrives in the office, warning her about the “man with the sand dollar face” before collapsing and dying in her arms. After she runs for help, she returns to find that the dead body has vanished, and detectives and police officers think that she must simply be a batty old lady. Undeterred, she decides to continue the investigation herself. But Hattie’s snooping leads her into more danger than she bargained for—especially after she finds a crumpled piece of paper with information about a mysterious substance called “Blue Diamonds.” Hattie’s first-person narrative voice is distinctive, and provides plenty of charming moments; her reflections on menopause, for instance, are laugh-out-loud funny. But although the narrative implies that the other characters are wrong to underestimate Hattie, they might have trusted her even less if they were privy to her thoughts; her musings sometimes veer into sanctimonious territory, as when she internally berates others for lacking her own friendly and thoughtful personality. She also tends to spout shallow philosophy (“Happiness [is] harnessed in the form of human connections”). Also, because readers’ perceptions of events are confined to Hattie’s lighthearted kookiness, many will be unprepared for the suddenly serious tone during the climax.
A cozy but flimsy mystery with an eccentric protagonist.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62747-235-7
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Ontario Shore Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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