In Geller’s debut novel, a husband and wife face tough decisions when doctors diagnose their young son with a rare liver disease.
Marcia and Michael Kleinman’s marriage—already sailing on rough waters—hits the rocks when a sudden onset of jaundice sends their son, Max, to the doctor. Initially inconclusive, tests eventually show a rare condition that will likely require a liver transplant. This crisis forces Marcia, the novel’s protagonist, to face the problems in her marriage and her dissatisfaction with life in general. Her mother was once a classical pianist (she recorded a few albums that “didn’t sell particularly well”), and Marcia also dreamed of a career as a musician, until marriage and motherhood sidetracked her. Now, faced with an ailing son, she plays piano again, finding release in her attempts to master some of Beethoven’s most challenging sonatas. Author Geller understands the drive of the artist. “It’s not the notes exactly,” Marcia says; it’s “capturing it. Capturing the music.” A neat sentiment—the difference between knowing technique and knowing music lies in the heart of the true artist—but one that perhaps underlines a problem with this novel: Sometimes it feels like Geller knows the notes but lacks the music. As such, the interpersonal notes—the overbearing mother, the distant husband, etc.—feel over-rehearsed, rote and drained of invention, leading to a finale that flirts with melodrama. Yet the novel succeeds because Geller, a pathologist, spends most of his time focused on a realm he understands very well: the world of medicine. There aren’t many works of fiction that focus so completely—and so devastatingly—on the process of illness: the meetings, the waiting, the diagnoses, etc. All of this is communicated with the cool tone of a great doctor giving a patient the bad news while looking her in the eye.
Medical drama outweighs interpersonal drama in this affecting debut.
Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1481762328
Page Count: 290
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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