Mullett Lake in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula provides the backdrop for this shifting narrative of love, death and a second chance.
Coburn’s romantic novel is shared by a quartet of characters: Paul Crockett is a reliable local handyman/contractor; Jessica is the love of his life; Claudia Cardinelli is a vacation cottager with a wandering husband, Freddie; and supporting this cast is neighbor Agnes Decker, who is a catalyst for helping Paul and Claudia move beyond their low points. Claudia has had a miscarriage and later discovers Freddie is having an affair. Faced with these revelations, she considers divorce, but fate steps in and Freddie is killed in a motorcycle accident (along with his girlfriend). Before his demise, readers observe Freddie in a bar with his girlfriend, and his Harley Davidson parked outside, though these glimpses elicit little empathy from the reader. As Paul tools around Mullett Lake, readers learn the back story of his relationship with Jessica; the two were very much in love and moved away from the community, but Paul has inexplicably returned alone. Paul, 50, and 35-year-old Claudia are brought together by Mrs. Decker and some time after going to the Hack-Ma-Tack for drinks, they fall in love. But is this the happily ever after for which they’re both looking for? And what about Jessica? Coburn effectively depicts this transitional time for Paul and Claudia. The novel is short and the pace is brisk. Characters are believable and the romance is engaging. Much is made of the age difference between Paul and Claudia, with a definite slant toward the 50-year-old male perspective. (Readers are reminded often that Paul is very fit.) While the story focuses on moving beyond loss and the importance of hope, the work would have benefited from more complexity. Strong in establishing the Mullett Lake environment, the author also nicely captures the bittersweet, fleeting quality of love. A pleasant, predictable tale that will satisfy fans of character-driven romance.
Pub Date: March 24, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615462127
Page Count: 118
Publisher: Michael Coburn Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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