The Days of Anna Madrigal: A Novel (Tales of the City) Hardcover Author: Visit Amazon's Armistead Maupin Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0062196243 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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*Starred Review* Alas, this is the ninth and final novel in Maupin’s beloved Tales of the City series, the first three volumes of which were made into a television miniseries starring Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis, which has now achieved cult status. But let’s not mourn the end of this run of rich, loving novels. Instead, let’s read this tender last one as a celebration of the wonderful characters Maupin created, whose lives have centered on landlady and den-mother Anna Madrigal’s home at 28 Barbary Lane in San Francisco. Anna is now 92 years old, as infirm as her age would dictate, but the feisty, generous, selfless spirit that has guided her and attracted so many people to her side remains unbroken. While a group of her friends heads off to Burning Man, the wild arts festival held yearly in the Nevada desert, other friends of Anna’s take her back to her hometown, also in Nevada, which she has not visited since she left there as a boy in the 1930s, and where she now hopes to reconcile a situation that has been on her mind since then. Admirably, Maupin’s last novel in the series is as compulsively readable and endearing as all previous novels have been. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: An eight-city author tour will be accompanied by national-media and online-publicity campaigns. --Brad Hooper
Review
“Wonderful … Maupin’s last novel in the (Tales of the City) series is as compulsively readable and endearing as all the previous novels have been.” (Booklist (starred review))
“Maupin spins his usual good-hearted web of intrigues involving people who have created their own communities.” (Kirkus Reviews)
“The ninth Tales of the City installment is Maupin’s farewell to his beloved cast of characters … Maupin’s flare for dialogue and fully realized contemporary characterizations is again on display … this installment is a memorable, satisfying capstone to his series.” (Publishers Weekly)
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- Series: Tales of the City
- Hardcover: 288 pages
- Publisher: Harper; F First Edition edition (January 21, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0062196243
- ISBN-13: 978-0062196248
- Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
I remember picking up a copy of TALES OF THE CITY way back in 1978 at a local bookstore. It was love at first sight and it has never wavered. Waiting for the next in the series is one of the joys of being alive. Now we have what is being called the last novel in the series THE DAYS OF ANNA MADRIGAL, perhaps the most beloved of all of Armistead Maupin's many lovable characters. And we are reminded, a little sadly, that nothing lasts forever. The orange and black Monarch butterfly does not flutter its beautiful wings for long.
Besides Mrs. Madrigal, the characters who over the years have become as real to us as our own friends and family are back again: chiefly Brian, Michael, Mary Ann and Shawna. Of course Mr. Maupin adds other characters, Lasko, Margaret, Wren (sort of) et al. Without giving away too much of the plot, Mrs. Madrigal (we finally find out where she got her name) has unfinished business; and time is not on her side. After all, she is now 92, in frail health and smokes medical marijuana rather than the delicious pot she used to grow herself. By the way, she finds it tiresome being told that she is immortal. And all these characters make their way to Nevada, some to a Burning Man event, while Mrs. Madrigal and others travel to the place where she lived until she ran away at 16, Winnemucca.
Mr. Maupin has not lost his touch. All the elements we have come to expect of his story-telling are here. The story is always a little quirky, just off-center with enough surprises to keep us guessing but always firmly set in the here and now, mirroring the times. We are then not surprised that characters are on FaceBook, they google, they use Craigslist, they navigate with a GPS, they travel in Rvs, they use You Tube.
Though bringing back (for the third time since the first ending of the chronicle) characters from "Tales of the City" in Sure of You (Tales of the City Series, V. 6)in 1989, the cover of "The Days of Anna Madrigal" (showing a view from San Francisco of the iconic Golden Gate Bridge) seems misleading to me. Almost the whole novel is set in Nevada, at a contemporary Burning Man Festival and Winnemucca, the town with legalized prostitution to which the now 92-year-old Anna Madrigal returns, where she grew up as a boy named Andy, the son of the Blue Moon bordello owner. A substantial -- and for me, the best -- part of the book takes place in 1936 Winnemucca, where Andy was smitten by a swarthy and masculine Basque classmate called Lasko, while confused about feeling he was really a girl (in a boy's body).
Andy surgically altered decades ago into Anna is far from being the only transgendered character in the novel, though for me she is the only interesting one. Former compulsive womanizer Brian is back with a plump new wife with the incongruous name of Wren. They take Mrs. Madrigal to Winnemucca in Brian's RV. Brian's daughter, Shawna, is at the Burning Festival, shopping for a sperm donor. The now-62-year-old Michael ("Mouse") Tolliver, who practically coparented her is at Burning Man with his much-younger husband Ben, feeling shivers of mortality even more than Mrs. Madrigal is.
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