Too long, too intricate, and finally too obvious: a nice plot that ends up tripping over itself.
First-novelist Herrick (stories: At the Sign of the Naked Waiter, 1992) offers a science tale about a genetically engineered baby.
Brooklyn housewife Pinky is happy with her bioengineer husband Arthur and son Teddy, seven, but she wants another child—yet can’t convince Arthur to have one. Arthur, who does DNA research, is feeling rather besieged by the maternal instinct just now: his lab assistant, Marina, has talked him into giving a sample of his semen so she can have a child of her own, and Arthur is afraid Pinky will find out. What he doesn’t know is that Marina has “boosted” his semen with DNA chromosomes in a genetic experiment of her own. Ken Fishhammer, head of the bioengineering department, knows what Marina has done and is interested in seeing the outcome—especially when the university expels him and shuts down his lab after discovering that he was performing unauthorized research. Ken goes to work for a private laboratory and waits for Marina’s child as the only means left to test his work now that his project has been cancelled. Marina gives birth to a healthy boy but dies a few months later in a road accident, and her sister Katya is left with the child. Ken immediately steps in and offers to adopt the boy, but his offers on the child’s behalf (a specially constructed nursery in the lab, along with a deaf-mute nanny named Maurice) are rejected when Katya informs him that “other relatives” have taken the baby. Indeed, Pinky wakes up that same day to discover a healthy, happy, well-fed baby boy on her doorstep. Happy ending? More like a bad start. Ken isn’t willing to let his superchild escape and sets about tracking him down. Meanwhile, can Arthur (who’s now trying to adopt the boy) keep his family together? It might help if he knew the child were really his.
Too long, too intricate, and finally too obvious: a nice plot that ends up tripping over itself.Pub Date: March 31, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03197-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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