The daughter of Harold Robbins debuts with a Paris romance in which Cinderella marries Prince Charming, only to find he’s secretly the Beast. Robbins overstates her heroine’s every feeling and supercharges each character into near-caricature. She clearly loves landscape and description and reels off plenty of brand names stickered to the rich and famous. Motherless, penniless American Djuna Cortez, only 21 and alone in the City of Light, has just had her charge card cut off by her surly father, Emile, when she receives a letter stating that she’s inherited vast wealth from Emile’s father, the well-known painter Joaqu°m Carlos Cortez. (Emile himself is passed over, for reasons revealed only near the close.) Aside from her grandfather’s bank accounts, Djuna also inherits his large apartment and studio, his paintings and chateau, publishing rights to his ten journals, and his winery in the Loire Valley. As Djuna reads the journals, the story alternates between her firsthand account of Parisian high society in the mid-1980s and Joaqu°m’s notes about his youth as a budding bohemian artist in Paris during the ’40s and ’40s: his love affairs, models, and ritzy friends, including towering but luminous egoist/hat-designer Mitya Troubetskoy and, much later, budding novelist Pascal Maron, both of whom have been Joaqu°m’s lovers and are now partial inheritors. Djuna’s snooty half-brother introduces her to six-foot African model Navarine, who in turns leads her into a romance with Jean-August Briard, a strangely reserved but blindingly handsome “cosmopolitan hero out of a Fitzgerald novel” who knows everything about grapes and offers to help save her failing winery. Unfortunately, Djuna discovers only after she marries him that his reserve masks sadism. Within months, she’s bruised, battered, and seeking divorce. Then Jean-August really gets mad . . . . Carefully crafted for its genre, but only faintly reminiscent of anything real.
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-86755-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
