The conclusion to Honolulu poet and novelist Yamanaka’s raffish trilogy (Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, 1996; Blu’s Hanging, 1997) is another agreeably comic tale of growing up absurd amid the natural beauty and polyracial confusion of the islands. The relentlessly episodic story is narrated by Toni Yagyuyu, middle child of a Japanese-American family whose father, the eponymous Harry, runs the taxidermy shop above which his unruly family live. Besides Toni, there are her forthright “Mommy,” who’s both science teacher and earth mother; older brother Sheldon (“Shelly”), a flamboyantly gay cross-dresser; and younger sister Bunny, “a home-sewn clothes horse” and everybody’s pet. Meantime, everybody also yells a lot at everybody else in a hilariously rendered Hawaiian-American pidgin dialect, as Yamanaka knowingly takes us through Toni’s reluctant progress toward adulthood. Her only distinction in an otherwise mediocre high-school career is a prizewinning science project designed to answer the question “What do wild Euro-Polynesian pigs do to the ecosystem?—After that, things get weird. In college, Toni discovers cocaine, discos, and sex; flunks out; forms a curious further relationship with her childhood buddies the macho Santos brothers (football hero Maverick and criminally inclined Wyatt)—either of whom may be the lover who got her pregnant, both of whom become baby daughter Harper’s “fathers.” Baby is named for Billy Harper, the Yagyuyus’ live-in friend who’s too young to be Toni’s real boyfriend . . . it goes like that, until the cholerically weary Harry (a terrific comic character) accepts as his apprentices Toni and the Santoses, and passes the torch.” But with conditions. It’s a breezy ride of a story, helpfully peppered with wonderfully obscene and funny shards of broken English (“I might have to broke your ass”). High-energy fiction from a talented writer. One’s only complaint is that this essentially reworks, with very similar if not identical characters, the contents of Yamanaka’s earlier books.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-374-16850-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
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
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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