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Simon & Schuster |
Bright lights, big cities
Urban landscapes play a big role in this month's five book roundup.
from the August 17, 2007 edition
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Free Food for Millionaires, by Min Jin Lee (Warner)
After four years at Princeton, Casey Han has picked up, in addition to her magna cum laude in economics, "a refined diction, an enviable golf handicap, wealthy friends, a popular white boyfriend, an agnostic's closeted passion for reading the Bible… But she had no job and a number of bad habits." So when her Korean immigrant father beats her and kicks her out of the house, Casey finds herself adrift with only her credit card to support her. Big and crowded with characters, Lee's highly readable debut novel looks at the cultural pulls on two generations of Korean-Americans. While she reads "Middlemarch" compulsively, Casey has less in common with idealist Dorothea Brooke than with "Vanity Fair's" Becky Sharp in her determination to sample a life she can't afford. Grade: B
The Late Bloomer's Revolution, by Amy Cohen (Hyperion)
New York dating columnist Cohen's memoir offers an antidote to readers who have overdosed on chick lit. In one year, she loses her mother, her job, her live-in boyfriend, and her looks (to a psychosomatic rash). "I'd lost everything that I thought made me who I was, and what was I left with? I had no idea. It was almost like a bad science-fiction movie where you have no face or identifying characteristics." Cohen is a master of self-deprecating humor: Take her opening essay, where she and her mother travel to Prague, only to be picked up by a gorgeous doctor (Jewish, no less). Cohen is initially delighted, until she realizes that Dr. Right is flirting with her mom, not her. While amusing, the essays never quite attain a larger arc, but readers will enjoy keeping the dating columnist company as she learns to ride a bike and relax inside her own skin. Grade: B-
The Tin Roof Blowdown, by James Lee Burke (Simon & Schuster)
Burke, clearly still grieving for New Orleans, uses the aftermath of hurricane Katrina to spin out a hard-boiled tale of sin and redemption. During the chaos and looting, four small-time thugs take a crowbar to a mansion, literally pulling cash out of the walls. Unfortunately for them, the home belonged to the city's most notorious gangster – although two of them don't have to worry about that for long. Det. Dave Robicheaux is trying to find the surviving looter before anyone else, believing he holds the answer to what became of a beloved priest who disappeared while trying to rescue parishioners trapped by the flood. The strength of "Blowdown" comes from Burke's detailing of the destruction of New Orleans. He uses a combination of journalistic precision and raw fury to detail how "in one night, the city [was] reduced to the technological level of the Middle Ages." Grade: B+
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