A man seeking to make amends reflects on his complicated relationships with his two sons.
Readers of Criswell’s 2012 novel Peacemaker will recognize the sequel’s opening courtroom scene, but the point of view will be unfamiliar. In the earlier book, readers watched through the eyes of 18-year-old Jayson “Shorty” Jackson as he came before a judge in a Michigan state court at the end of serving two years in juvenile detention for shooting his friend Michael Stephens. Stephens was a promising student with a scholarship to Michigan State University. In the audience were Jayson’s relatives, including a thin, wiry man he barely recognized at first as his father, Jayson “Big Man” Jackson. Peacemaker described the son’s fraught relationship with his father through the son’s eyes; in Criswell’s sequel, the perspectives are reversed and expanded. “Big Man” not only tells his own story in these pages, but, in an unexpected elaboration that Criswell handles adeptly, he also learns the story of his own father, “Pops,” and his Uncle Buddy, told in long flashback scenes in which Jim Crow Mississippi and racially charged midcentury Detroit come to life in significant detail. (Pops recalls the 1967 Twelfth Street Riot in Detroit: “It looked like something out of a war zone. The street was in total chaos. Folks were screaming, fighting, breaking windows, flipping over cars, looting and burning down businesses.”) The narrative is significantly complicated with these rapid-fire shifts in time frame, switching from Pops’ story to his son’s and grandson’s, but Criswell controls the material with an immense degree of skill, pacing her revelations about all three characters so that the generational story never loses its energy. Readers of the earlier volume will know some of the key plot surprises before they happen, but the sequel is knowingly crafted for newcomers as well, investing all of its main characters with three-dimensional believability. They may at times think simplified, negative things about each other, but the reader is never tempted to follow suit. Indeed, the struggle that Criswell’s men have being good fathers and sons is the most rewarding aspect of this gripping novel.
A historically detailed, emotionally rich story of three generations of men dealing with and sometimes evading their duties to one another.
Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4787-6551-6
Page Count: 315
Publisher: Outskirts Press Inc.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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