A nostalgic swan song about loss, grief, and unexpected connections.
An elderly widow shares her life story with a Ukrainian cab driver as he takes her from Manhattan to the suburban hospice center where she plans to spend her final days.
Carden’s (The Secret Files of Henry F. Sherwood, 2005) novel opens on Christmas Eve as Patricia deGroot Abercrombie, known as Trish, chats aloud to her dead husband. She also has a thing or two to say to her dead lover. Trish has been living alone for decades, mourning those she has lost, and she has chosen this particular day to travel to a hospice on Long Island. Trish climbs into a cab and asks the driver to take her on a tour of various sites throughout the city before her final destination. The driver, Zhelyazko Kowalchuk, tells Trish to call him Ziggy as he attempts to involve her in conversation. Considering her personal pedigree too fine to warrant talking with a lowly taxi driver, Trish continues speaking aloud to her dead loved ones instead. When Ziggy shares that he has also lost his great love and that he copes with PTSD from his time in Vietnam, Trish is disarmed and begins to engage with him. She offers details about her past, taking him on a romp through memories of living large during the 1930s, ’40s, and beyond, as they simultaneously visit locations that hold importance to her. As Ziggy takes Trish closer to the hospice, secrets from her past emerge, and readers will likely wonder if there is a bigger reason that she has landed in this particular cab. Told in the third person, the narrative shifts its focus periodically from Trish to Ziggy, bringing his personal tribulations to the foreground as well. The story is expressed primarily through the pair’s conversation and Trish’s flashbacks, resulting in a preponderance of dialogue and precious little setting details. The emphasis on dialogue creates a lack of physical grounding and causes the tale to feel more like Trish’s hastily assembled memoir than the novel it is intended to be. Even so, the author artfully portrays the equalizing nature of sorrow through the losses each character has suffered and the manner in which it brings two unlikely souls together.
A nostalgic swan song about loss, grief, and unexpected connections.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64438-389-6
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Booklocker.com
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.
Passion, friendship, heartbreak, and forgiveness ring true in Lovering's debut, the tale of a young woman's obsession with a man who's "good at being charming."
Long Island native Lucy Albright, starts her freshman year at Baird College in Southern California, intending to study English and journalism and become a travel writer. Stephen DeMarco, an upperclassman, is a political science major who plans to become a lawyer. Soon after they meet, Lucy tells Stephen an intensely personal story about the Unforgivable Thing, a betrayal that turned Lucy against her mother. Stephen pretends to listen to Lucy's painful disclosure, but all his thoughts are about her exposed black bra strap and her nipples pressing against her thin cotton T-shirt. It doesn't take Lucy long to realize Stephen's a "manipulative jerk" and she is "beyond pathetic" in her desire for him, but their lives are now intertwined. Their story takes seven years to unfold, but it's a fast-paced ride through hookups, breakups, and infidelities fueled by alcohol and cocaine and with oodles of sizzling sexual tension. "Lucy was an itch, a song stuck in your head or a movie you need to rewatch or a food you suddenly crave," Stephen says in one of his point-of-view chapters, which alternate with Lucy's. The ending is perfect, as Lucy figures out the dark secret Stephen has kept hidden and learns the difference between lustful addiction and mature love.
There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6964-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Despite getting a little preachy toward the end, Leary has largely achieved a genuinely funny novel about alcoholism.
A supposedly recovering alcoholic real estate agent tells her not-exactly-trustworthy version of life in her small New England town in this tragicomic novel by Leary (Outtakes from a Marriage, 2008, etc.).
Sixty-year-old Hildy Good, a divorced realtor who has lived all her life in Wendover on the Massachusetts North Shore, proudly points to having an ancestor burned at the stake at the Salem witch trials. In fact, her party trick is to do psychic readings using subtle suggestions and observational skills honed by selling homes. At first, the novel seems to center on Hildy’s insights about her Wendover neighbors, particularly her recent client Rebecca McAllister, a high-strung young woman who has moved into a local mansion with her businessman husband and two adopted sons. Hildy witnesses Rebecca having trouble fitting in with other mothers, visiting the local psychiatrist Peter Newbold, who rents an office above Hildy’s, and winning a local horse show on her expensive new mount. Hildy is acerbically funny and insightful about her neighbors; many, like her, are from old families whose wealth has evaporated. She becomes Rebecca’s confidante about the affair Rebecca is having with Peter, whom Hildy helped baby-sit when he was a lonely child. She helps another family who needs to sell their house to afford schooling for their special needs child. She begins an affair with local handyman Frankie Getchell, with whom she had a torrid romance as a teenager. But Hildy, who has recently spent a stint in rehab and joined AA after an intervention by her grown daughters, is not quite the jolly eccentric she appears. There are those glasses of wine she drinks alone at night, those morning headaches and memory lapses that are increasing in frequency. As both Rebecca’s and Hildy’s lives spin out of control, the tone darkens until it approaches tragedy. Throughout, Hildy is original, irresistibly likable and thoroughly untrustworthy.
Despite getting a little preachy toward the end, Leary has largely achieved a genuinely funny novel about alcoholism.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-01554-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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