Elegantly written, though a little low on narrative energy.
A middle-aged narrator forced to give up her own athletic dreams becomes surrogate mother to four girls heading for the 1928 Olympics in Patterson’s latest (This Vacant Paradise, 2011, etc.).
The Amsterdam games in 1928 were the first to allow women to compete, and a patronizing, blatantly misogynic editorial in the Toronto Daily Star (“No female should be seen swaggering around pretending to be male”) makes it clear that plenty of people still think it’s a terrible idea. Narrator Mel Ross, the girls’ chaperone, knows this prejudice intimately; as a young married woman, she was ordered to give up running, blamed as the cause of her miscarriages. Recruited by hard-drinking Jack Grapes to chaperone the female Canadian track team he’s assembled, Mel observes the external and internal battles her charges—dubbed “the Peerless Four” by the press—must wage to compete. Bold, reckless Flo pulls a muscle while racing a boy for fun and blows the 800-meter final. Anxious, desperate-to-win Bonnie, enmeshed in an affair with her coach, is disqualified after two false starts. Pretty, aloof Ginger effortlessly wins the high jump, but all the media fuss about her as the team’s “Dream Girl” alienates her from the sport she once loved. Only calm, stable Farmer, who wins the javelin toss, knows exactly who she is and what she wants. Mel herself isn’t sure until the end of the novel, which is as much about her evolving relationships with Jack and with her husband as it is about the girls. Mel’s narration has a meditative, often melancholy tone that’s slightly odd in a sports story, but this is not a rah-rah tale of women triumphing against the odds. Quietly scathing about the outrageous treatment of female athletes, the novel also shows the toll that competitive pressure takes on a quiet, shy male runner. Surviving, Patterson suggests, is more important than winning.
Elegantly written, though a little low on narrative energy.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61902-177-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fashion lovers will enjoy descriptions of the design of clothing and accessories and the machinations of running fashion...
A widowed American woman navigates the world of fashion in 1938 Paris, getting caught up in the rivalry between two famous designers.
Lily Sutter is teaching art at a girl’s boarding school in England when her brother, Charlie, invites her to Paris. Drowning in the memories of her husband, who died two years earlier, and living in a world of gray, Lily has been unable to paint. Once in Paris and caught up in the glamorous circles of her brother and his married lover, Ania, Lily begins to see the world in color once again and picks up her brushes. The novel is divided into three parts, each section labeled with an oft-referenced primary color meant to symbolize the emotions described within it. The first, blue, is a paradox, representing longing, sadness, joy, and fulfillment. The second, red, is for love, death, and passion. And the last, yellow, is for sunshine, gold, and new beginnings but also warning and fear. Creating a world where fictional and real worlds overlap is tricky, particularly when famous events and people (in this case Elsa Schiaparelli and Coco Chanel) are a major part of the narrative. The novel includes as a plot point the reported real-world instance when the rivalry between Chanel and Schiaparelli became physical—accidentally or on purpose—and Chanel caused Schiaparelli’s costume to catch fire at a party. Mackin (A Lady of Good Family, 2015, etc.) goes beyond the facts, however. A substantial portion of the novel is composed of hypothetical interior monologues, thoughts, and motivations of the two real-life fashion icons. Readers interested in historical accuracy may find this distracting.
Fashion lovers will enjoy descriptions of the design of clothing and accessories and the machinations of running fashion houses before World War II.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-99054-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
"I'm Yakov Fixer... I'm the kind of man who finds it perilous to be alive." He is childless, as the Talmud said, alive but dead, and deserted by his wife. He leaves his native shtetl for Kiev to pass for a few months as a goyim. Then he is arrested for having counterfeited a name and is later accused of killing a child in a ritual murder. This is the Russia of Nicholas the Second, the increasing irrationale of anti-Semitism, the prophetic "stink of future evil"— and there seems to be no question that this is Malamud's strongest book. There may be more question whether Yakov is one of his "saint-schlemiehls." He's a simple man, an ignorant man, but he reads a little (Spinoza) and he thinks. Even in his outraged innocence he knows that he is a "rational being and a man must try to reason." During these long months of interrogation and internment, he develops a certain philosophy of his own even though "it's all skin and bones." But speculate as he does, protest as he does, how accept the fact that he is one of the chosen people, chosen to represent the destiny and racial guilt of the Jews? As a Job, and several of Malamud's earlier characters have been termed Jobs, he repudiates suffering and eventually his hate is stronger than his fear... Anticipating all the inevitable comparisons to which the book is equal, Malamud's Fixer, less ideological than Koestler's Darkness at Noon, less symbolic than Kafka's Trial, has elements of each but a more exposed humanity than either of them. It is a work of commanding power.
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1966
ISBN: 1412812585
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1966
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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