Laken handles the fraught subjects of class, race and family bonds with equal candor and sensitivity in this powerful book.
In Laken’s debut novel, a young couple tries to salvage their shaky marriage by buying a rundown house in a gentrifying Ann Arbor neighborhood.
Laken (Creative Writing/Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) first takes us to that house on a July night in 1987, when it’s just been the scene of a shooting. At least one person is dead, we learn, and Walker Price, eldest son of the black family that lived there, is in jail. Eighteen years later, Kate Kinzler ruefully contemplates the crummy Ann Arbor apartment she shares with husband Stuart. When they met, his easygoing ways were a relief from the high expectations of Kate’s affluent, hypercritical father. But at 29, Kate is tired of living like an undergraduate and tired of aimless Stuart as well. He knows it, so when Dad flourishes a big check to house-hunt with, Stuart swallows his resentment. But he seethes while Kate undertakes obsessive renovations and finally walks out shortly after they learn their new home was the scene of a murder. Alternating chapters introduce Walker, out of jail at age 36, and it’s clear he will cross paths with the troubled woman who bought his family’s house. But Laken’s careful plotting never seems contrived. The author so perceptively examines her varied cast’s personal conflicts and social anxieties that the few big coincidences feel real, the sort of improbable conjunctions that happen in real life. Laken makes palpable the huge role that homes play in people’s sense of identity and self-worth, and she delicately builds camaraderie between Kate and Walker, both grappling with the legacies of demanding fathers, without airbrushing the vast differences that divide them. A disaster occurs, but the human bonds that link these appealing characters are frayed, not broken. The author closes with a moving vision of “the struggle to hold lives together, to make shelter and lose it, to hope, to endure.”
Laken handles the fraught subjects of class, race and family bonds with equal candor and sensitivity in this powerful book.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-084092-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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