You were expecting maybe Shakespeare? Undemanding readers undeterred by the cardboard characters, B-movie dialogue and total...
A tumler and a good-time girl tangle with some nasty mobsters at a Catskills hotel in this latest from Adler (The War of the Roses, 2004, etc.).
Twenty-two-year-old Mickey Fine doesn’t care that his father thinks comedy is no profession for a nice Jewish boy. He takes a job as social director at Gorlick’s, a hotel/casino, even though he knows the clientele is composed of Jewish gangsters, their wives, kids and girlfriends. “Absolutely no wop jokes,” warns Sol Gorlick; apparently the gangsters’ Italian boss, Albert Anastasia, doesn’t find those funny. Readers won’t find many of Mickey’s jokes funny, but he charms 18-year-old Mutzie Feder, a fellow Brooklynite who dreams of movie stardom but settles for Pep Strauss, a handsome killer who makes her his “number one” and sends her to Gorlick’s for the summer of 1937. It turns out that being Pep’s number one includes being pimped to Anastasia and passed on to the local madam as a prostitute—not exactly what Mutzie had in mind when she dyed her hair Jean Harlow platinum. Luckily for her, Mickey’s fallen in love with Mutzie. (Who knows why, since she’s an accumulation of clichés, like all Adler’s characters.) So the boy and girl take it on the lam after witnessing one of Pep’s contract murders and get all the way to Albany, where Governor Herbert Lehman promises them he’ll nail those mobsters…just as soon as he wins the next election. A gangster wannabe named Irish catches the couple and brings them back to Gorlick’s, where the enraged Pep waits to dole out retribution. It takes some really bad jokes from Mickey and Mutzie’s clever manipulation of Irish to get them out of Gorlick’s and on the road to Hollywood.
You were expecting maybe Shakespeare? Undemanding readers undeterred by the cardboard characters, B-movie dialogue and total lack of period atmosphere will probably keep flipping pages to find out where the silly plot is going.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59020-034-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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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