Pedersen is not at her best in this dull chronicle of family life.
Third installment in the Hallie Palmer series (Heart’s Desire, 2005, etc.) offers more somber subject matter: the death of a parent.
Nearly 19 and studying graphic design at the Cleveland Art Institute, Hallie is summoned from a fraternity party (in this world, art students apparently hang out with jocks and frat boys) by news that her 39-year-old father has suffered a fatal heart attack and her mother is in shock and sedated. Returning home to her nine siblings, Hallie soon realizes that she’ll be bearing the brunt of child-care duties. Older brother Eric must return to college or he’ll lose his scholarship, younger sister Louise has run away to live with her boyfriend at M.I.T., and Mom has been moved to a psychiatric hospital. So Hallie drops out of school and begins as best as she can to raise seven kids on the Palmers’s scant savings. Old friends lend a hand: Bernard Stockton and his boyfriend Gil offer the occasional gourmet meal and showtune-inspired pep talk; old poker buddies Officer Rich and bookie Cappy keep a watchful eye; and Uncle Lenny, a salty sailor the children adore, puts order and laughter back into the grieving household. Finally, Pastor Costello takes over and gives Hallie a much-needed break to work on her deteriorating love life. The two previous books were set among the Stocktons, rich eccentrics with whom Hallie stayed while sorting out her home life. Relegating this wacky clan to the background while Hallie’s large family takes center stage works to this story’s disadvantage. The author devotes many pages to describing the utter chaos created by a large family, but fails to provide the amusing details and memorable characters that would keep all those chores from becoming a chore to read about.
Pedersen is not at her best in this dull chronicle of family life.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-47956-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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