The ramblings overtake the journey in short order, but fortunately Pearson knows how to string a tale—just not when to quit.
Another shaggy-dog tale from Pearson (Polar, 2002, etc.), past master of the Southern Gothic.
It would be unfair to call Pearson’s tale a yarn—it’s more a Big Ball of String, unraveling without end but never seeming to diminish. Naturally, it’s set in a small town in Virginia, where we follow our hero, middle-aged accountant Paul Tatum, as he makes his daily rounds among the great and the good of his little hometown. Paul still makes house calls, so he has privileged insights into the lives of his clients and picks up plenty of gossip about everybody else. Guns and sex provide most of the entertainment for spectators, and it’s the rare home that doesn’t have some such domestic turmoil on view: Even Paul’s misanthropic neighbor Stoney (a recluse and autodidact who repairs things for a living between PBS shows) turns out to have broken the heart of some other man’s wife, as Paul learned in a dry goods store from two elderly ladies who noticed him staring at the wife in question. Paul has had a girlfriend of sorts for some time now—a divorced mother named Mona, who belongs to a storefront Episcopal church and practices Tantra on the side—but he is strongly taken by the wife in the dry goods store, whose name turns out to be Maud. Unhappily married to a thuggish brute, Maud inspires pity as well as love in Paul, who sets out to rescue her. Toward this end, he enlists the help of Stoney, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Carpaccio’s painting of St. George, which Paul saw in Venice when he was there on vacation with Mona, who’d spent her honeymoon there years ago, before her daughter Dinky was born. Stoney agrees to help, but there are a few complications (and more than a few digressions) involved.
The ramblings overtake the journey in short order, but fortunately Pearson knows how to string a tale—just not when to quit.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03238-7
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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