The prolific Winton (The Riders, 1995; etc.) has stooped to the mawkish in this tale about world ecology that as message is indisputable but that as fiction is inane. Abel Jackson's forebears were whalers, his father a pearl- diver whose life was ended by a shark. When this tiny slip of a story opens, Abel is ten years old and living a life of hard but edenic subsistence with his mother on the family property that's squeezed along the coastline, a national park behind it, the bay, headland, and open sea n front. Part of the pair's income derives from snorkel-diving for abalone off Robbers Head, and it's a sign of the times when, after the good abaloner Mad Macka dies of a heart attack, he's replaced by the villain Costello, a rapist of the sea (unlike the good Abel and his mother, who take ``a couple of abalone from each clump, leaving the rest to breed and grow''). Costello is run off by the law after a heroic and admittedly dramatic intervention by Abel and his mom, but there are other woes in store for the sea. ``Things aren't the same, Abel,'' says mother. ``It's getting harder to hold on to good things.'' After unexplained fish kills (``The ocean is sick,'' says mom. ``Something is wrong''), Abel determines that he'll go ``to university to figure out the sea.'' His international career as a marine biologist takes him far from home, mother, and the enormous, blue, friendly groper he played with off Robbers Head throughout his boyhood. But age, time, and another disaster will bring him back forever to care for mother, baynow declared a sanctuarywife, and new family. Psychologically and in every other way a YA, though apparently aimed at an adult trade audience. Pretty writing (a baby girl has ``fists. . . like pink seashells'' and ``cried like a bird'') helps offset the simplistic elements of the whole.
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-84565-2
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
Sneering tone and choppy style mar this first novel, set in Sydney, from Australian author Moriarty.
Meet the Kettle sisters: 33-year-old triplets.
Gemma, Cat, and Lynne had the childhood from hell, thanks to their battling parents, and they still haven’t decided what they want to be when they grow up—if they grow up. They haven’t forgiven Mum and Dad and they can’t forget, for example, their sixth birthday party, when their father lit a firecracker and blew his finger off (it was preserved in Formaldehyde as a gruesome memento of the occasion). How ironic: it was his ring finger—an apt symbol of an explosive marriage. Some years later, after their parents’ divorce, the sisters leave home to confront hard truths about life and love. Family secrets and garden-variety troubles are trotted out in no particular order: Mum’s miscarriage. Frail but feisty granny. Unfaithful husbands and useless boyfriends. Happy ending? Oh, why not.
Sneering tone and choppy style mar this first novel, set in Sydney, from Australian author Moriarty.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-058612-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
Cheerfully engaging.
From Australian Moriarty (The Last Anniversary, 2006, etc.), domestic escapism about a woman whose temporary amnesia makes her re-examine what really matters to her.
Alice wakes from what she thinks is a dream, assuming she is a recently married 29-year-old expecting her first child. Actually she is 39, the mother of three and in the middle of an acrimonious custody battle with her soon-to-be ex-husband Nick. She’s fallen off her exercise bike, and the resulting bump on her head has not only erased her memory of the last 10 years but has also taken her psychologically back to a younger, more easygoing self at odds with the woman she gathers she has become. While Alice-at-29 is loving and playful if lacking ambition or self-confidence, Alice-at-39 is a highly efficient if too tightly wound supermom. She is also thin and rich since Nick now heads the company where she remembers him struggling in an entry-level position. Alice-at-29 cannot conceive that she and Nick would no longer be rapturously in love or that she and her adored older sister Elisabeth could be estranged, and she is shocked that her shy mother has married Nick’s bumptious father and taken up salsa dancing. She neither remembers nor recognizes her three children, each given a distinct if slightly too cute personality. Nor does she know what to make of the perfectly nice boyfriend Alice-at-39 has acquired. As memory gradually returns, Alice-at-29 initially misinterprets the scattered images and flashes of emotion, especially those concerning Gina, a woman who evidently caused the rift with Nick. Alice-at-29 assumes Gina was Nick’s mistress, only to discover that Gina was her best friend. Gina died in a freak car accident and in her honor, Alice-at-39 has organized mothers from the kids’ school to bake the largest lemon meringue pie on record. But Alice-at-29 senses that Gina may not have been a completely positive influence. Moriarty handles the two Alice consciousnesses with finesse and also delves into infertility issues through Elizabeth’s diary.
Cheerfully engaging.Pub Date: June 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-399-15718-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Amy Einhorn/Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
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