Stegner picks up some years later with Joe and Ruth Allson of All the Little Live Things and paraphrases some of the themes of that book as well as the later Angle of Repose. In particular the irreconcilables between generations (you'll remember the death of their son) and the fact of growing old alone with the worst of life, crabbed by more than arthritis. They live in one of those California "Death Row" Sunshine Cities where Joe feels overcharged if he's offered a half-price Senior Citizen ticket. He's churlishly "killing time" before it gets around to killing him while also losing a tooth here, a friend there. Ruth, and a postcard, return him to the journal he kept during a trip to Denmark after the death of their son when he fell a little in love with the Danish Astrid, ostracized everywhere. This then alternates between the present and the past, the story within a story which will resolve a few painful unknowns for Joe and Ruth, but particularly for Joe—the disappointed father and perhaps the disappointed man. Stegner always tells a very sympathetic tale (this is perhaps not as strong as the above two) which is all too mortally true, equalizing the distance that it travels. It is just these qualities of recognition and participation which create a susceptible readership.
Pub Date: May 21, 1976
ISBN: 0140139400
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1976
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Most enjoyable for its smart, often humorous details about moviemaking and celebrity culture.
A portrait of the actress as a young woman.
We meet Molly Bit in a chapter called "College: 1993." It’s an arts school where “everybody wanted to be famous…and if they didn’t get famous, they might die right there in their beds.” Unlike the other kids, Molly Bit has no doubt that she will hit the mark, and after a brief second chapter called "Dues: 1997," we arrive at "Success: 2001." By now, Molly has made two movies with her best friend and has appeared in a three-page photo spread in Vanity Fair titled “Girl From the Future: Why in Six Months Everyone Will Know Who Molly Bit Is.” This proves to be no exaggeration—she soon reaches mega-star status, with the action figures and tabloid exposés to prove it. By "Venice: 2006," she’s got a publicist, a personal assistant, and a bodyguard she’s paying 50,000 euros for four days—because she also has a very persistent stalker. The plot of Bevacqua’s debut has a dramatic twist two-thirds of the way through, but there’s something a bit mechanical about it, and subsequent sections lose momentum. Though the author sets out to reveal the human being inside a Hollywood legend, Molly never quite comes into focus. We spend a fair amount of time inside her head, but her thoughts have a generic quality: “Southern California tried to rob you of your deep interiority. LA did. Hollywood. It was impossible not to lose at least some of it, for shallow thoughts and conversations to cast a spell that sealed a layer off. For six months she’d been contemplating an ass lift.” This feels more like a hypothesis about what an actress would think than what one specific, fully realized character thinks.
Most enjoyable for its smart, often humorous details about moviemaking and celebrity culture.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-0458-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
A wise and sad coming-of-age story showing how people are shaped by their losses. Recommended for both adult and teenage...
The tangled destinies of three kids growing up in a tightknit African-American community in Southern California.
“She was seventeen then. She lived with her father, a Marine, and without her mother, who had killed herself six months earlier. Since then the girl had earned a wild reputation—she was young and scared and trying to hide her scared in her prettiness.” Bennett’s debut novel tells the story of this grieving 17-year-old girl, Nadia, her best friend, Aubrey, and her boyfriend, Luke, told partly by Nadia and partly by a chorus of eponymous “Mothers,” the church ladies of Upper Room Chapel, where Luke’s father is the pastor. The three teenagers are drawn together by the damage they have already suffered: Luke’s promising football career was ended by a terrible injury; Aubrey has moved away from home to escape abuse by her stepfather. More trouble awaits when Nadia discovers she's carrying Luke’s baby and decides not to keep it. This decision creates a web of secrets that endures for decades—though the ever watchful, ever gossiping Mothers never stop sniffing around and suspecting. Nadia tries to escape the clutches of small-town drama by attending college and law school across the country, but when she returns home to care for her ailing father, she finds herself enmeshed in unfinished business. “All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we’d taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season.” Far from reliably offering love, protection, and care, in this book, the mothers cause all the trouble.
A wise and sad coming-of-age story showing how people are shaped by their losses. Recommended for both adult and teenage readers.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5247-0986-0
Page Count: 435
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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