Eye-catching Victoria Gotti, daughter of Godfather John Gotti, debuts as an accomplished thriller writer. Does Gotti's first novel feature her ties to her father? Well, John Gotti is here, but only psychically, in the form of two characters in conflict with each other. In DeCiccio's Restaurant on Boston's wharf, union strongman Joseph Sessio (read: John Gotti) is shot twice through the head. The power vacuum is filled by distinguished Senator Frank Morgan of Massachusetts (read: John Gotti), who was ushered into prominence long years before with union money derived in part from his father's old ties with the union as a bootlegger (the union moved his booze). The heroine is blond Taylor Brooke, a serious young lawyer with a pricey Boston firm who is tapped to defend Tommy Washington, the 19-year-old black busboy accused of shooting Sessio. But word is out that the rubout was set up by Sessio's son Mike, who wanted to take over his father's empire. Taylor finds herself befriended by the handsome, sensual, art-fancying Sessio, who tells her that he doesn't believe Washington killed his father. Thus, the murdered man's son is helping the defending attorney get his falsely accused father's murderer acquitted, although this points the finger only more strongly at himself. Taylor's background: Her mother was abandoned by her married lover, Frank Morgan (before he became senator), then became the alcoholic victim of a vehicular homicide. Taylor was raised in a Catholic girls' orphanage in Fall River, married and then fled from an abusive husband, assumed a new identity in Boston and, her career secretly underwritten by her guilt-ridden father, became a lawyer. Now dad hopes to mend fences. But bad people and a car-bomber are out to kill Taylor, as is her knife-bearing husband. Surprisingly effective throughout, until the parricidal final pages, which fly by too fast for credibility even for melodrama. Flashy but powerful.
Pub Date: March 10, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-86323-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
An unusual, overextended romance, fairy tale in parts but with a sprinkling of grit.
Cleverly combining tender and tough, Diffenbaugh’s highly anticipated debut creates a place in the world for a social misfit with floral insight.
After more than 32 homes, 18-year-old Victoria Jones, abandoned as a baby, has given up on the idea of love or family. Scarred, suspicious and defiant, she has nothing: no friends, no money, just an attitude, an instinct for flowers and an education in their meaning from Elizabeth, the one kind foster parent who persevered with her. Now graduating out of state care, Victoria must make her own way and starts out by sleeping rough in a local San Francisco park. But a florist gives her casual work and then, at a flower market, she meets Grant, Elizabeth’s nephew, another awkward soul who speaks the language of flowers. Diffenbaugh narrates Victoria and Grant’s present-day involvement, over which the cloud of the past hangs heavy, in parallel with the history of Elizabeth’s foster care, which we know ended badly. After a strong, self-destructive start, Victoria’s long road to redemption takes some dips including an unconvincing, drawn-out subplot involving Elizabeth’s sister, arson and postnatal depression. While true to the logic of its perverse psychology, the story can be exasperating before finally swerving toward the light.
An unusual, overextended romance, fairy tale in parts but with a sprinkling of grit.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-345-52554-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
With wit and poetry, Dunn redefines the limits of the acceptable.
Like a collaboration between John Irving and David Lynch, this audaciously conceived, sometimes shocking tale of love and hubris in a carnival family exerts the same mesmeric fascination as the freaks it depicts, despite essential structural flaws.
In language as original and fantastic as her story, Dunn (Attic, 1970; Truck, 1971) tells the tale of Binewski's Carnival Fabulon, an unremarkable traveling show until patriarch Aloysius decides to breed his own freaks. Using drugs, insecticides and radioactivity, Al and his wife Crystal Lil, sometime geek, produce Arturo, a thalidomide child; Elly and Iphy, beautiful Siamese twins; Olympia, the novel's narrator, an albino hunchbacked dwarf trained as a barker; and the outwardly normal but telekinetic Chick. With overtones of classical tragedy, Olympia relates Arturo's growing power: first over his sisters, who vie for his love, then over the entire show, and finally over the many followers of the cult of "Arturism," who, like their prophet, have pieces of themselves amputated to transcend appearance. (Arms and legs become lion food; hands and feet, fodder for "transcendental maggots," ironic souveniors of Arturo.) Arturo's pride and jealousy combine with the arrival of a failed assassin, now a freak himself, and with the twins' sideline of selling "norms" unique sex, to bring the show to a flaming end. Although the framing story—years later, Olympia schemes to save Miranda, her daughter by Arturo, from a perverse philanthropist—is poorly integrated, and the novel sometimes judders along, this is captivatingly original stuff.
With wit and poetry, Dunn redefines the limits of the acceptable.Pub Date: March 27, 1989
ISBN: 394-56902-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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