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
Hilderbrand’s portrait of the upper-crust Tate clan through the years is so deliciously addictive that it will be the “It”...
Queen of the summer novel—how could she not be, with all her stories set on an island—Hilderbrand delivers a beguiling ninth (The Castaways, 2009, etc.), featuring romance and mystery on isolated Tuckernuck Island.
The Tate family has had a house on Tuckernuck (just off the coast of swanky Nantucket) for generations. It has been empty for years, but now Birdie wants to spend a quiet mother-daughter week there with Chess before Chess’s wedding to Michael Morgan. Then the unthinkable happens—perfect Chess (beautiful, rich, well-bred food editor of Glamorous Home) dumps the equally perfect Michael. She quits her job, leaves her New York apartment for Birdie’s home in New Canaan, and all without explanation. Then the unraveling continues: Michael dies in a rock-climbing accident, leaving Chess not quite a widow, but devastated, guilty, unreachable in the shell of herself. Birdie invites her younger daughter Tate (a pretty, naïve computer genius) and her own bohemian sister India, whose husband, world-renowned sculptor Bill Bishop, killed himself years ago, to Tuckernuck for the month of July, in the hopes that the three of them can break through to Chess. Hunky Barrett Lee is their caretaker, coming from Nantucket twice a day to bring groceries and take away laundry (idyllic Tuckernuck is remote—no phone, no hot water, no ferry) as he’s also inspiring renewed lust in Tate, who has had a crush on him since she was a kid. The author jumps between the four women—Tate and her blossoming relationship with Barrett, India and her relationship with Lula Simpson, a painter at the Academy where India is a curator, Birdie, who is surprised by the recent kindnesses of ex-husband Grant, and finally Chess, who in her journal is uncoiling the sordid, sad circumstances of her break with normal life and Michael’s death.
Hilderbrand’s portrait of the upper-crust Tate clan through the years is so deliciously addictive that it will be the “It” beach book of the summer.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-04387-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
A bold but flawed debut novel.
There’s a mystery, a coming-of-age, abundant melodrama and even more abundant medical lore in this idiosyncratic first novel from a doctor best known for the memoir My Own Country (1994).
The nun is struggling to give birth in the hospital. The surgeon (is he also the father?) dithers. The late-arriving OB-GYN takes charge, losing the mother but saving her babies, identical twins. We are in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1954. The Indian nun, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, was a trained nurse who had met the British surgeon Thomas Stone on a sea voyage ministering to passengers dying of typhus. She then served as his assistant for seven years. The emotionally repressed Stone never declared his love for her; had they really done the deed? After the delivery, Stone rejects the babies and leaves Ethiopia. This is good news for Hema (Dr. Hemalatha, the Indian gynecologist), who becomes their surrogate mother and names them Shiva and Marion. When Shiva stops breathing, Dr. Ghosh (another Indian) diagnoses his apnea; again, a medical emergency throws two characters together. Ghosh and Hema marry and make a happy family of four. Marion eventually emerges as narrator. “Where but in medicine,” he asks, “might our conjoined, matricidal, patrifugal, twisted fate be explained?” The question is key, revealing Verghese’s intent: a family saga in the context of medicine. The ambition is laudable, but too often accounts of operations—a bowel obstruction here, a vasectomy there—overwhelm the narrative. Characterization suffers. The boys’ Ethiopian identity goes unexplored. Shiva is an enigma, though it’s no surprise he’ll have a medical career, like his brother, though far less orthodox. They become estranged over a girl, and eventually Marion leaves for America and an internship in the Bronx (the final, most suspenseful section). Once again a medical emergency defines the characters, though they are not large enough to fill the positively operatic roles Verghese has ordained for them.
A bold but flawed debut novel.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-41449-7
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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