Both the familiar and the strange are eloquently evoked and celebrated here: a model anthology.
Editor Ravenel has cast her net widely and well, making the 18th installment of this deservedly successful series one of its best yet.
Only a handful of the contributors have familiar names, and two of them appear here in peak form. John Dufresne’s “Johnny Too Bad” is a hilarious monologue spoken by a transplanted New Englander and would-be writer experiencing a Florida hurricane alongside his brainy, voluptuous girlfriend Annick and “chronically aggressive” dog Spot. Now that Dufresne has moved south, FFW (Florida’s Funniest Writer) Carl Hiaasen will need to look to his laurels. Equally impressive is Dorothy Allison’s “Compassion,” whose narrator’s unflinching description of her beloved “Mama’s” death from cancer blossoms into a rich orchestration of family contention, closeness, and pride. A somewhat similar story, Donald Hays’s “Dying Light,” depicts the subtly changing relationships among another moribund cancer victim, his frail devoted wife, and their unhappily married, underachieving adult son. Embattled relationships also figure in Michael Knight’s “Ellen’s Book,” which is and isn’t about “a dead baby haunting his father,” and Latha Viswanathan’s breezy portrayal of an Indian matchmaker operating out of Houston via the Internet (“Cool Wedding”). Several stories accomplish what Steve Almond declares the objective of his own fine, wild story of alleged alien visitation, “The Soul Molecule”: “to find a note of grace in the incontrovertibly strange.” Best are Brock Clarke’s Barthelmian fantasy about a victim of divorce who consoles himself by buying the city of Savannah (“For Those of Us Who Need Such Things”) and Ingrid Hill’s literally miraculous tale of a maimed Vietnam vet’s fortuitous collision with stoical black healer “Mother Peaches” (“The Ballad of Rappy Valcour”). And if traditional stories are your thing, don’t miss Paul Prather’s loving depiction of a group of elderly women who shepherd a rundown church through its inevitable demise (“The Faithful”).
Both the familiar and the strange are eloquently evoked and celebrated here: a model anthology.Pub Date: July 11, 2003
ISBN: 1-56512-395-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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