Readers with a soft spot for lovable, saintly freaks may overlook the simplistic characterizations and manufactured plot.
Debut novelist Baker attempts a contemporary fable about an epically proportioned young woman searching for love and acceptance in her upstate New York hometown.
After her mother dies giving birth to her, Truly Plaice grows up with petite sister Serena Jane under their father’s care until his death when Truly is 12. The snobbish minister’s wife takes in conventionally pretty Serena, while freakishly large Truly ends up on the Dyersons’ hardscrabble farm. She finds a friend in Amelia Dyerson, whose poverty and learning disabilities make her an outsider like Truly, and in Marcus Thompson, another misfit because he’s so smart. Popular Serena seems the lucky one, until doctor’s son Bob Bob date rapes and impregnates her. They marry and head to Buffalo where they remain for eight years while Bob Bob morphs into Dr. Robert Morgan IV. Shortly after their return to Aberdeen with seven-year-old Bobbie, Serena runs off. Robert and Amelia are called to identify her dead body in a nearby town. Truly, growing larger by the day, agrees to move in with Robert to help raise sweetly effeminate Bobbie. It’s a pituitary gland problem that’s causing Truly’s perpetual enlargement, declares Robert, who begins secretly treating her. Meanwhile she comes across a quilt into which Robert’s great-great-grandmother stitched herbal, perhaps magical cures not long after the Civil War. Soon Truly is concocting her own brews and facing life-or-death choices, as the remedies can both cure and kill. Despite a few missteps, she finds ultimate redemption, complete with weight loss and marriage. It is probably no coincidence that Aberdeen County has a Celtic ring, since despite a few contemporary reference points (Vietnam, gays) it has an out-of-time, Brigadoon atmosphere.
Readers with a soft spot for lovable, saintly freaks may overlook the simplistic characterizations and manufactured plot.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-19420-4
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A richly detailed and emotionally charged debut.
In his last sermon, the Prophet Muhammad said, "Observe your duty to Allah in respect to the women, and treat them well," but in many Muslim countries, tradition relegates women to subservient roles. Isra Hadid, the heroine of Rum's debut novel, has been reminded of this every day of her life.
Unable to complete school in Palestine, where she grew up, Isra was married off by her parents to American deli owner Adam Ra’ad and sent to Brooklyn, New York, where she was forced to live in the crowded Bay Ridge home of her in-laws, Fareeda and Khaled, and their three other children. Almost immediately tensions erupted, and the newly arrived immigrant found herself on the receiving end of near-daily beatings and verbal abuse. Conditions further worsened after Isra gave birth to four daughters in little more than five years—her lack of sons being evidence, Fareeda claims, of Isra’s deficiency. The situation shifts dramatically, however, after Isra and Adam are killed in an accident, leaving their children to be raised by the Ra’ads. Now, a decade after Isra’s and Adam’s deaths, their oldest child, Deya, age 18, receives a mysterious message from an unidentified source, asking her to travel to a Manhattan bookshop. When she does, an estranged family member reveals some jarring truths about the family’s history. More importantly, the disclosure gives Deya the tools she needs to take charge of her life rather than allowing Fareeda and Khaled to marry her off. In a note accompanying an advance copy of her book, Rum acknowledges that writing her intergenerational saga meant "violating [the] code of silence” and might even bring “shame to [her] community.” Nonetheless, in telling this compelling tale, Rum—who was born in Brooklyn to Palestinian immigrants herself—writes that she hopes readers will be moved “by the strength and power of our women.”
A richly detailed and emotionally charged debut.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 9780-0-62-69976-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Messily executed, but the author’s emotional commitment to her material makes it compelling.
Her many near-fatal mishaps aren’t as deadly as marriage and motherhood for a fiercely independent Italian-American woman in this century-spanning novel.
We know from the scene-setting preface that Mariastella Fortuna’s “eighth almost-death” led to a mysterious hatred for her formerly beloved younger sister, Tina. Debut author Grames, who based the novel largely on her own family’s history, launches it in a stale magic-realist tone that soon gives way to a harder-edged and much more compelling look at women’s lives in a patriarchal society. Born in Calabria in 1920, Stella is given the same name as a sister who died in childhood because her father, Antonio, refused to get a doctor. He heads for America three weeks after the second Stella’s birth and comes home over the next decade only to impregnate his submissive wife, Assunta, three more times. During those years, young Stella’s brushes with death convince her that the ghost of her dead namesake is trying to kill her, but that’s not as frightening as the conviction of everyone around her that a woman's only value is as a wife and mother. Stella has seen enough during her brutal, domineering father’s visits to be sure she never wants to marry. When, after a 10-year absence, Antonio unexpectedly arranges for his family to join him in America in 1939, readers will hope that Stella will find a freer life there. But the expectations for women in their close-knit Italian-American community in Hartford prove to be the same as in Calabria. The pace quickens and the mood darkens in the novel’s final third as it enfolds an ever growing cast of relatives—with quick sketches of the character and destiny of each—and Antonio’s actions grow increasingly monstrous. The rush of events muddies the narrative focus, and the purpose of the epilogue is equally fuzzy. However, a tender final glimpse of elderly Tina conveys once again the strength and hard-won pride of the Fortuna women.
Messily executed, but the author’s emotional commitment to her material makes it compelling.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-286282-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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