A sincere story of success in spite of trauma, in a sad and cynical world.
An earnest, parsed, memoirlike depiction of a woman’s life with epilepsy.
If she hadn’t been diagnosed with epilepsy at 14, Mischa Dunn, who, with her Chilean diplomatic elite mother and Irish-American intellectual father immigrated to the U.S. after violent political conflict in Chile hit too close to home, would’ve faced more than her share of challenges. Tracy’s first book, cleverly organized into chapters named for seizure locations—“The Subway,” “The Ministry of Defense” —follows observant, cynical Mischa from 14 to 36 as she copes with the traumas of her medical condition and builds a life. The relationship Mischa has with her seizures is nuanced and complex and serves as proxy for any rupture in life’s peace, mental or physical. The book speaks to a broader audience than epileptics. Mischa says, “Just me. I go to bed with my epilepsy, I wake up with my epilepsy.” The implication rings true throughout the book: we fall asleep as ourselves, rise as ourselves and find our own solutions. Tracy calls her book a “novelry,” a novel of composite stand-alone short story parts, although it reads more like a memoir. Plot and character are replaced by history and opinion in a kind of slice-of-life-style narrative. Individually, chapters are weak threads in Mischa’s story. Mischa’s observations are often cynical, bordering on politely snide, which, because of Tracy’s tendency to tell, instead of show the why and how in her novel, opinions sometimes feel like reductive or insensitive condemnations of certain characters, NGOs Mischa works with or even entire cultures. The many doctors in the book are treated with simplistic, categorical disgust, and Chapter 23, of 27, is a strangely long-winded dialogue between two pregnant women in a coffee shop; watery soliloquies twist the novel toward its somber conclusion in a sudden, disjointed way. Some readers may find interwoven historical or factual information or opinion interesting, but it blurs lines between narrative and authorial voice in at times dangerous, confusing ways.
A sincere story of success in spite of trauma, in a sad and cynical world.Pub Date: April 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1453834701
Page Count: 279
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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