Smith (When Venus Fell, 1998, etc) has a real affection for folk artists and rural characters, but even so her story suffers...
A Brooklyn artist creates a scrap-metal sculpture of a giant bear for a small Georgia community—and, years later, his grieving son heads south to find his father’s masterpiece.
The Powell clan—poor farmers and folk artists—believe that a bear sculpture will serve as a protective totem against the polio epidemic that has crippled and killed so many local children and adults. According to the half-remembered teachings of their long-dead Granny Annie, that is, who was part-Cherokee. Another superstitious relative has a load of scrap metal shipped to the Brooklyn studio of Richard Riconni, an unrecognized genius whose saintly young sister died in an iron lung. Riconni sets to work, using leg braces to create the Iron Bear’s armature and a tractor carburetor for its heart. When the finished sculpture finally arrives in Tiberville, many deride it, but others love it—including the current head of the Powell clan, who even gives his newborn daughter a bearish name, Ursula, to commemorate the day. She grows up healthy and happy on the Powell farm located on (where else?) Bear Creek, playing around the Iron Bear, which her father eventually bought and moved to his land, though at a terrible cost: he then couldn’t afford medical care for Ursula’s mother, who died in childbirth as a result. The baby boy she leaves behind is further afflicted with autism, able to communicate only with the Iron Bear, which speaks to him in the voice of his dead mother. Enter Quentin Riconni, a handsome hunk inspired by his father’s violent death to a quest for the Iron Bear. Ursula won’t part with it, of course—and Quentin falls in love with her and begins welding his own sculpture, Bear Two.
Smith (When Venus Fell, 1998, etc) has a real affection for folk artists and rural characters, but even so her story suffers by remaining—well, improbable.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-316-80077-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
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
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose...
Sparks (The Longest Ride, 2013, etc.) serves up another heaping helping of sentimental Southern bodice-rippage.
Gone are the blondes of yore, but otherwise the Sparks-ian formula is the same: a decent fellow from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches falls in love with a decent girl from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches—and is still suffering the consequences. The guy is innately intelligent but too quick to throw a punch, the girl beautiful and scary smart. If you hold a fatalistic worldview, then you’ll know that a love between them can end only in tears. If you hold a Sparks-ian one, then true love will prevail, though not without a fight. Voilà: plug in the character names, and off the story goes. In this case, Colin Hancock is the misunderstood lad who’s decided to reform his hard-knuckle ways but just can’t keep himself from connecting fist to face from time to time. Maria Sanchez is the dedicated lawyer in harm’s way—and not just because her boss is a masher. Simple enough. All Colin has to do is punch the partner’s lights out: “The sexual harassment was bad enough, but Ken was a bully as well, and Colin knew from his own experience that people like that didn’t stop abusing their power unless someone made them. Or put the fear of God into them.” No? No, because bound up in Maria’s story, wrinkled with the doings of an equally comely sister, there’s a stalker and a closet full of skeletons. Add Colin’s back story, and there’s a perfect couple in need of constant therapy, as well as a menacing cop. Get Colin and Maria to smooching, and the plot thickens as the storylines entangle. Forget about love—can they survive the evil that awaits them out in the kudzu-choked woods?
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose corn syrup, stickily sweet but irresistible.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2061-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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