Sohn deserves recognition for addressing some rather dark issues and for avoiding tidy conclusions, but her story would have...
The author of Run Catch Kiss (1999) gets domesticated.
In the late ‘90s, Sohn turned her romantic misadventures into a regular gig with New York Press and a debut novel. But what does a sex columnist do when she grows up? She gets married, moves to Brooklyn, has a kid and writes all about it, first in New York magazine’s “Mating” and “Breeding” columns and now here. Sohn’s first novel appeared with chick lit’s first wave and earned positive reviews for being smart and edgy. Mommy lit was, in retrospect, the inevitable successor to all those novels about pink cocktails, designer shoes and true love, but Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It, which arrived in the United States in 2002, was the simultaneous genesis and apotheosis of that genre. Sohn’s latest seems more than anything like an attempt to cash in on a trend. The novel follows the intersecting lives of four very different women. Rebecca is a freelance writer with a baby girl and a husband who is basically perfect in every way except that he no longer wants to have sex with his wife. Lizzie’s commitment to attachment parenting may be at least in part a reaction to her ambivalence about her mixed-race child and his mostly absent musician father. Melora is a famous actress with an adopted son and serious problems. Karen is a stay-at-home mom, a real-estate fetishist and a total sociopath. All these women live in Park Slope, and their bemused “only in Park Slope!” observations are the novel’s most annoying feature.
Sohn deserves recognition for addressing some rather dark issues and for avoiding tidy conclusions, but her story would have been significantly more satisfying if she had understood that the phenomena she chronicles, from one-upmomship on the playground to the libido-less marriage, have been well documented beyond the confines of brownstone Brooklyn.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7763-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
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
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
