The emotions are raw at times, but there’s a cool tone of postmodern post-mortem throughout as well, raising hackles and...
A far cry from the hot-hostess high-jinks of Smoking Hopes (1996), Alexander’s first novel, this is a painfully personal tale of Daddy’s Little Girl come home to Texas to agonize over whether she should help him die quietly, thereby avoiding his gruesome end from throat cancer. Hali may be diminutive, but she’s no lightweight, being a Ph.D. in teleology and a major babe besides. When she arrives on the scene from New York, however, where her “open” relationship with an artist on the cusp of fame has hit a rough patch, she’s already aware that she may have to fulfill a tough special role for the family. At first there’s hope, as Dad reads optimism in his doctors’ evasions and the punishing therapy seems to be having its desired effect. Father and daughter discover a renewed appreciation for each other’s cosmological interests and similar philosophies. But not many months pass before a different scenario emerges: last-chance surgery is ruled out as the cancer spreads to his spinal column, and Hali is at Dad’s bedside when he speaks privately to her of helping him out. Eventually, she agrees, and with the help of a muscle-bound drifter in nurse’s garb she becomes the clandestine family Kevorkian—except that Dad won’t die no matter how many drug cocktails they give him, and Hali and the nurse feel increasingly the tugs of a fatal attraction.
The emotions are raw at times, but there’s a cool tone of postmodern post-mortem throughout as well, raising hackles and sympathy from first to last.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-57962-087-7
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A high-thread-count sheet of jokes swathing a plot as slender as its eating-challenged narrator.
A Hollywood divorce with all the trimmings: luxury real estate, lawyers, TMZ, plastic surgery, an Oscar, and a night in jail.
It begins at the narrator’s 48th birthday party, where her A-list movie star husband, Trevor, toasts her…work ethic. “My fertility is on its last heaving throes, my eggs scrambled and crapping out, waving the white maxi pad. All that’s left for me is flushing and sweat. Soon, I will be all dried out, a human tumbleweed, rolling along Sunset Boulevard to guzzle martinis at the Polo Lounge,” she says. Rushing along in a torrent of inner monologue, snappy dialogue, puns, memes, and wisecracks, the narrator of Levangie’s (Seven Deadlies, 2013, etc.) latest goes from the birthday celebration to a book party with signature cocktails called “Tres Deadlies” and “Deadlies on Arrival”—suggesting that the author, a former Hollywood wife herself, knows whereof she speaks. When the narrator gets home, she finds the code to the gate of her “mid-century California ranch-style estate in the famed Palisades Riviera” has been changed. After she climbs over, the guard, ordered to keep her out, tasers her. “I’m putting this marriage in turnaround,” announces the extremely self-absorbed Trevor. “You know, like when I had that cartel project I was really in love with but then we couldn’t get Guillermo to direct and then I kind of fell out of love and I fired everybody?” The narrator digs in her heels—after all, she needs a place to raise her daughter, Pep, hide her ex-con sister, Fin, and entertain her book club, currently reading “a multigenerational family saga set in the Burmese mountains in the winter of 1806, written by a queer-leaning Bangladeshi paraplegic.” This means war.
A high-thread-count sheet of jokes swathing a plot as slender as its eating-challenged narrator.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-16681-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Love, grief, and forgiveness illuminate this compelling summer read.
Throughout college, Evvie, Maggie, and Topher were the best of friends. But time and the mistakes that come with simply being human may strain their love to the breaking point.
The daughter of a hardworking Jamaican immigrant and an abusive American banker, Evvie Williams grew up a child actor, ironically starring as an adorable daughter in The Perfect Family. That’s when her struggles with weight began, as her mother put her on her first diet at age 7. After her father hit her mother one too many times, she and her mother pulled up stakes and moved to London. Years of yo-yo dieting later, she heads off to college, where she meets Maggie Hallwell, the redheaded only daughter in a raucous and somewhat posh family from Sussex. They discover Topher, the son of the impossibly glamorous Joan Winthrop, while shopping for dorm furniture. Immediately smitten with each other, the three are inseparable, even rooming together for the last years of college. Of course, there’s also Evil Ben, so dubbed because he never smiled at Evvie, even when she began bartending at the same local pub. Nonetheless, Maggie falls head over heels in love with Ben at first sight. Green (The Sunshine Sisters, 2017, etc.) masterfully switches from one character's perspective to another's, devastatingly sketching their successes, showing how they're riddled with pain, and setting them on a collision course. Maggie eventually marries her beloved Ben, yet their seemingly perfect marriage is fractured by a lack of children and Ben’s catastrophic drinking, which Maggie desperately tries to keep secret. Topher embarks on a successful acting career and finds love. Yet he’s also struggling with a secret about his past. Evvie has not only lived a glamorous life as a supermodel, but also raised her son, Jack. And she, too, hides a few secrets. Thirty years later, the friends reunite, but one of their secrets threatens to destroy everything.
Love, grief, and forgiveness illuminate this compelling summer read.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-58334-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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