This first novel by playwright and storywriter Youngblood (The Big Mama Stories, 1989) is a young girl's tale of sadness and longing. It's also an erotic odyssey that seems to trace the narrator's incipient lesbianism to her misplaced feelings for her parents. In the 1960s, Mariah Santos, a seven-year-old girl of mixed racial heritage, lives happily with her mother, a military nurse, on a base in Kansas. But that idyllic life turns sour when Mariah's mother's lover breaks off their affair, and her mother becomes a drug addict. No longer do Mariah and her mother share their daily ``soul kisses'' or their love of words, and Mariah is soon shipped off to live with two great-aunts in Georgia, where she spends her adolescence longing for her mother's comforting bosom. Living with Faith and Merleen—who aren't actually sisters but lovers—Mariah quickly falls into their routines of home cooking, good manners, churchgoing, and hygiene. An excellent student, she also finds release in her cello. At age ten, she discovers her mother's trunk with all of its secrets, including information about her father, a painter living in Los Angeles. At 14, she deliberately causes enough trouble for her long-suffering aunts that they agree to let her head west to stay with her father. In their small West Hollywood apartment, Mariah develops a weird sexual life bordering on incest: She masturbates to her father's porn, wears his clothes when he's out, and has orgasmic dreams about him. When both he and she sense that things are getting out of hand, Mariah returns to Georgia, where she finally resolves her feelings about her long- absent mother and takes solace in the healing power of language. More mournful than soulful, this melancholic narrative is a decent addition to the literature of race and sexuality (with homage paid to Alice Walker et al.). Some didactic interludes intrude on an otherwise straightforward story of erotic confusion. (Book-of-the-Month alternate selection)
Pub Date: May 5, 1997
ISBN: 1-57322-063-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
IN THE NEWS
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.
Glück’s international reputation as an accomplished and critically acclaimed contemporary poet makes the arrival of her new volume an eagerly anticipated event. This slender collection meets these expectations with 44 poems that pull the reader into a realm of meditation and memory. She sets most of them in the heat of summer—a time of year when nature seems almost oppressively heavy with life—in order to meditate on the myriad realities posed by life and death. Glück mines common childhood images (a grandmother transforming summer fruit into a cool beverage, two sisters applying fingernail polish in a backyard) to resurrect the intense feelings that accompany awakening to the sensual promises of life, and she desperately explores these resonant images, searching for a path that might reconcile her to the inevitability of death. These musings produce the kinds of spiritual insights that draw so many readers to her work: she suggests that we perceive our experiences most intensely when tempered by memory, and that such experiences somehow provide meaning for our lives. Yet for all her metaphysical sensitivity and poetic craftsmanship, Glück reaffirms our ultimate fate: we all eventually die. Rather than resort to pithy mysticism or self-obsessive angst, she boldly insists that death creeps in the shadows of even our brightest summers. The genius of her poems lies in their ability to sear the summertime onto our souls in such a way that its “light will give us no peace.”
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.Pub Date: April 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018526-0
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Spielman’s debut charms as Brett briskly careens from catastrophe to disaster to enlightenment.
Devastated by her mother’s death, Brett Bohlinger consumes a bottle of outrageously expensive Champagne and trips down the stairs at the funeral luncheon. Add embarrassed to devastated. Could things get any worse? Of course they can, and they do—at the reading of the will.
Instead of inheriting the position of CEO at the family’s cosmetics firm—a position she has been groomed for—she’s given a life list she wrote when she was 14 and an ultimatum: Complete the goals, or lose her inheritance. Luckily, her mother, Elizabeth, has crossed off some of the more whimsical goals, including running with the bulls—too risky! Having a child, buying a horse, building a relationship with her (dead) father, however, all remain. Brad, the handsome attorney charged with making sure Brett achieves her goals, doles out a letter from her mother with each success. Warmly comforting, Elizabeth’s letters uncannily—and quite humorously—predict Brett’s side of the conversations. Brett grudgingly begins by performing at a local comedy club, an experience that proves both humiliating and instructive: Perfection is overrated, and taking risks is exhilarating. Becoming an awesome teacher, however, seems impossible given her utter lack of classroom management skills. Teaching homebound children offers surprising rewards, though. Along Brett’s journey, many of the friends (and family) she thought would support her instead betray her. Luckily, Brett’s new life is populated with quirky, sharply drawn characters, including a pregnant high school student living in a homeless shelter, a psychiatrist with plenty of time to chat about troubled children, and one of her mother’s dearest, most secret companions. A 10-step program for the grief-stricken, Brett’s quest brings her back to love, the best inheritance of all.
Spielman’s debut charms as Brett briskly careens from catastrophe to disaster to enlightenment.Pub Date: July 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-345-54087-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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