A journalist turns to color therapy to transcend her emotional pain in this eclectic novel.
In the mid-1990s, middle-aged Iris Miller works for Northern California–based Eco Planet magazine, and she obsesses about her former lovers, her desire to change the world, and her longing for celebrity and wealth. She used to foster kids but was blacklisted by local agencies after she told a social worker about how much she wanted a child of her own, which caused the worker to cite “boundary issues.” She then adopts a baby, whose teenage mother quickly has a change of heart. Iris also has a serious relationship with a man named Felix Moss, who dies of colon cancer. As a member of a Jewish family ravaged by the Holocaust, she’s tortured by her friend Ephraim Kiever’s disclosure that his grandfather was a member of the Nazi party. Later, she attends a Native American peyote ceremony. There, she has a vision of a route to peace in the Middle East, involving the construction of a sweat lodge in Jerusalem, open to members of the three Abrahamic religions. She writes a story based on the vision and travels to Israel to accept a Jerusalem Post award for it. However, two friends whom she invites get kidnapped by the Palestine Liberation Organization. Throughout her trials, she uses color therapy, an alternative medicine treatment that’s said to help heal the body and mind. Author Skolnick-Bagnoli (Shiny Objects, 2009, etc.) has produced an imaginative, discursive, and rollicking tale. Her account of Iris’ turn to color therapy is intriguing, and the book includes a full-color appendix that asserts the healing properties of different hues. However, the plot is so scattered that it seems more like a fragmented series of impressions than a novel, leapfrogging from one thought to the next. Also, although the writing can be refreshingly quirky (“her cougar inclination to pursue the dashing alpha male had remained intact”), it’s never clear how much of the story is intended to be comic, and the vision at the heart of the story is borderline incomprehensible.
An entertainingly creative work, but one that lacks coherence and plausibility.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9650530-6-8
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Spaceframe Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
A love letter to the power of books and friendship.
GET IT
Women become horseback librarians in 1930s Kentucky and face challenges from the landscape, the weather, and the men around them.
Alice thought marrying attractive American Bennett Van Cleve would be her ticket out of her stifling life in England. But when she and Bennett settle in Baileyville, Kentucky, she realizes that her life consists of nothing more than staying in their giant house all day and getting yelled at by his unpleasant father, who owns a coal mine. She’s just about to resign herself to a life of boredom when an opportunity presents itself in the form of a traveling horseback library—an initiative from Eleanor Roosevelt meant to counteract the devastating effects of the Depression by focusing on literacy and learning. Much to the dismay of her husband and father-in-law, Alice signs up and soon learns the ropes from the library’s leader, Margery. Margery doesn’t care what anyone thinks of her, rejects marriage, and would rather be on horseback than in a kitchen. And even though all this makes Margery a town pariah, Alice quickly grows to like her. Along with several other women (including one black woman, Sophia, whose employment causes controversy in a town that doesn’t believe black and white people should be allowed to use the same library), Margery and Alice supply magazines, Bible stories, and copies of books like Little Women to the largely poor residents who live in remote areas. Alice spends long days in terrible weather on horseback, but she finally feels happy in her new life in Kentucky, even as her marriage to Bennett is failing. But her powerful father-in-law doesn’t care for Alice’s job or Margery’s lifestyle, and he’ll stop at nothing to shut their library down. Basing her novel on the true story of the Pack Horse Library Project established by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, Moyes (Still Me, 2018, etc.) brings an often forgotten slice of history to life. She writes about Kentucky with lush descriptions of the landscape and tender respect for the townspeople, most of whom are poor, uneducated, and grateful for the chance to learn. Although Alice and Margery both have their own romances, the true power of the story is in the bonds between the women of the library. They may have different backgrounds, but their commitment to helping the people of Baileyville brings them together.
A love letter to the power of books and friendship.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-56248-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
Categories: GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
Did you like this book?
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2020 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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.
