More conventional in form and less excitingly engaged with American history than her plays, but good enough to cause hope...
Faulkner gets an African-American rewrite in this first novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright (Topdog/Underdog, etc.).
It’s July 1963. Sixteen-year-old Billy Beede has been living in Lincoln, Texas, with her Uncle Roosevelt and Aunt June for six years, ever since her reckless, high-living mother Willa Mae died in Arizona. Willa Mae’s lesbian lover, Dill Smiles, claims to have buried her with a pearl necklace and a diamond ring, and the grave is about to be plowed up and paved over by a supermarket developer. When pregnant Billy discovers that her lover is married, she heads for Arizona to unearth the jewelry to pay for an abortion. The angry teenager professes to have no feelings for her “liar and cheat” of a mother, but, as she employs Willa Mae’s con-artist tricks to make her way west, Billy begins uncovering a deeper meaning in what Willa Mae called “The Hole,” a quality that she identified in people only so “she’d know how to take them.” All the characters here have Holes: Roosevelt has lost his church and his vocation as a minister; he and June can’t have children; Dill endured Willa Mae cheating on her with men; neighbor Laz Jackson watches his beloved Billy dally with a smooth-talking adulterer; Roosevelt’s widowed cousin Star struggles with bill collectors and the shame of not being able to keep son Homer in college. Playing to her strengths as a dramatist, Parks constructs the narrative as a series of first-person monologues, including several blues-drenched soliloquies by the defunct Willa Mae. Echoes of As I Lay Dying, the characters’ concerns swirl around their relationships with a dead woman whose decayed body offers an uncomfortable reminder of what awaits them all. The muted happy ending doesn’t have Faulkner’s biblical grandeur, but we’re glad to see Parks’s hard-pressed men and women get a break.
More conventional in form and less excitingly engaged with American history than her plays, but good enough to cause hope that more may come.Pub Date: May 13, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-6022-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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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