Love this writer. Love these characters.
Three generations of smart, articulate women deal with challenging life passages.
Henrietta, 70, lost her beloved husband—a famous chef—11 months ago and cannot recover emotionally or financially. Her straits are such that she has grudgingly allowed the reissue of The Inseparables, an X-rated bestseller she wrote in her 20s. She’s also started selling tchotchkes from around her house, but the most valuable of them, a weathervane, has gone missing. Meanwhile, her daughter, Oona, an orthopedic surgeon, is navigating the waters of a choppy divorce from her pothead ex-lawyer spouse, Spencer, and has embarked on a dubious relationship with their couples therapist. Oona and Spencer’s 15-year-old daughter, Lydia, has been the victim of a terrible classmate at boarding school, Charlie, who made her think he was her boyfriend, gave her her first kiss, and then posted pictures of her breasts on the Internet. “Hartwell took students as young as six, taught them Mandarin, Shakespeare, and computer coding, and spat them back out in to the world as currency traders or diplomats or white-collar criminals.” This Charlie kid is getting started early; he's ruined Lydia’s life in a way not completely different than the overexposure that still torments her ex–sex-writer grandmother. Nadler (The Wise Men, 2013), a male writer in his 30s, truly dazzles with his understanding of women—this is the kind of book that will cause female readers to fall in love with the author. The three parallel plots unfold very tautly for at least two-thirds of the duration, then things slow down with too many flashbacks and digressions in the climactic chapters. The resolutions of all the problems are a little flat, if unarguably realistic. But these things are more something for book groups to talk about than serious flaws.
Love this writer. Love these characters.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-33525-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
More genuine and tender than much of Everett's previous work, but no less impressive intellectually: a high point in an...
Desperation outstrips the satire in Everett's latest exercise in narrative wizardry (Glyph, 1999, etc.), as a lonely African-American writer faces private torment and instant fame when his parody of ghetto literature is taken as the real deal.
His own generation's version of an invisible man, Thelonious Ellison, a.k.a. Monk, is a largely unknown academic novelist who visits hometown Washington, D.C., to give a paper and see his mother and sister. No sooner does he return to California than Sis, a doctor in an abortion clinic, is shot dead at work. Someone has to take care of Mom, who's showing the first wrenching signs of Alzheimer's, so Monk returns home. There, his frustration with a runaway bestseller written in ghettospeak by a bourgeois black woman after visiting Harlem for a couple of days is fueled by endless rejections of his own new manuscript; in a rage he pumps out a parody and sends it under a pseudonym to his agent—who promptly secures a six-figure advance and a seven-figure movie deal. Stunned that no one recognizes his book as a send-up, Monk refuses to let his true identity be known. Meanwhile, he must cope with his mother's rapid decline, his gay brother's sudden animosity, and the discovery among his father's papers of letters indicating not only that Dad had a white mistress long ago, but that Monk has a half-sister his age. Struggling to maintain his own identity as his creation looms larger than life and his family redefines itself, he makes choices that render him invisible no more.
More genuine and tender than much of Everett's previous work, but no less impressive intellectually: a high point in an already substantial literary career.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2001
ISBN: 1-58465-090-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A moody exploration of bleak wartime Britain.
Healey looks back fondly at the tradition of spooky English country-house fiction while adding a few twists of her own.
With more than a few nods to Jane Eyre and Rebecca, this debut novel throws an awkward but stalwart heroine into a decaying house with history and mystery to spare. Friendless Hetty Cartright has found a home working among the stuffed specimens at a major natural history museum in London. When, in 1939, the museum decides to farm out its collection to houses in the countryside in order to avoid their destruction in the anticipated bombing of the city, Hetty is assigned to guard the stuffed mammals in their temporary home at Lockwood Manor. The decaying manor, ruled by the imperious and lascivious Lord Lockwood, has “four floors, six flights of stairs, and ninety-two rooms,” some with resident ghosts, and Hetty soon has her hands full attempting to protect the animals, some of which disappear and many of which she finds in disconcerting new spots. Scorned by the household staff, Hetty finds an ally in Lord Lockwood's sensitive, unstable daughter, Lucy, who narrates the portions of the novel that Hetty doesn't. As the two become closer and face their individual fears and insecurities, the peril of the house amps up, culminating in a disastrous party. While Healey sometimes lays on the atmospheric menace with a heavy hand, especially considering how light on action the novel actually is, and though she ties up her plot threads in a few hasty pages, her depictions of the historical period and of the dread of anticipating full-scale war are vivid. The animals, frozen in place and unable to defend themselves either against the encroaching Germans or the more immediate dangers of the live animals and insects that want to devour them, mirror the plight of the women caught in Lockwood Manor.
A moody exploration of bleak wartime Britain.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-358-10640-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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