The beautifully evoked jungles of southern Mexico are the setting for distinguished critic Guerard's eighth novel (Christine/Annette, 1985, etc.), a story that layers diaries and narratives from three separate time periods—1870, 1922, and the present—to tell of a fabulous Mayan ruin, Casas Grandes, and its nearby dopplegÑnger, a folly in the jungle called the Gran Hotel Balneario Chimalapa. Beginning in 1982 with the arrival of Tulane graduate student Eloise Deslonde, who is tracing the movements of the 19th-century adventuress Rosellen Maurepas for her thesis, ``The Liberated Woman in Antebellum and Postbellum New Orleans,'' the book plunges us into a world of interlocking stories of time-warped passions. We follow Rosellen from her first glimpse, as a teenager, of the dashing mercenary William Walker to her later attempt, in 1870, to determine once and for all whether Walker really died at the hands of a firing squad—or escaped to Casas Grandes. Charles Stanfield, a 20-year-old engineer, accompanies the bewitching Rosellen on her search. Hired to survey the site for a canal linking the Atlantic and the Pacific, Stanfield, instead of doing his job, falls into an idyll with Marita, an Indian girl, while Rosellen disappears among the haunted pyramids. Fifty years later, in 1922, Stanfield will return to the scene, drawn by advertisements for a 45-round bout featuring Jack Johnson, the dethroned black boxer. There, he will pass time with the boxer and his absurd retinue, including the erotic adventuress Monica Swift (based on the feminist poet Mina Loy). There, too, like Rosellen before him, he will disappear. And many years later, Eloise, busy unraveling the record of these lives, will almost vanish as well. For lovers of Mexico, then, a speculative biography of a place where, by paths only a novelist can reimagine, the figures of quite different epochs intersect and interact. At times bewildering and overly dense—like the jungle it evokes—and, in the end, much like the Grand Hotel Balneario itself: haunted, mysterious, beguiling.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-880909-45-6
Page Count: 390
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
Thoroughbreds and Virginia blue-bloods cavort, commit murder, and fall in love in Roberts's (Hidden Riches, 1994, etc.) latest romantic thriller — this one set in the world of championship horse racing. Rich, sheltered Kelsey Byden is recovering from a recent divorce when she receives a letter from her mother, Naomi, a woman she has believed dead for over 20 years. When Kelsey confronts her genteel English professor father, though, he sheepishly confesses that, no, her mother isn't dead; throughout Kelsey's childhood, she was doing time for the murder of her lover. Kelsey meets with Naomi and not only finds her quite charming, but the owner of Three Willows, one of the most splendid horse farms in Virginia. Kelsey is further intrigued when she meets Gabe Slater, a blue-eyed gambling man who owns a neighboring horse farm; when one of Gabe's horses is mated with Naomi's, nostrils flare, flanks quiver, and the romance is on. Since both Naomi and Gabe have horses entered in the Kentucky Derby, Kelsey is soon swept into the whirlwind of the Triple Crown, in spite of her family's objections to her reconciliation with the notorious Naomi. The rivalry between the two horse farms remains friendly, but other competitors — one of them is Gabe's father, a vicious alcoholic who resents his son's success — prove less scrupulous. Bodies, horse and human, start piling up, just as Kelsey decides to investigate the murky details of her mother's crime. Is it possible she was framed? The ground is thick with no-goods, including haughty patricians, disgruntled grooms, and jockeys with tragic pasts, but despite all the distractions, the identity of the true culprit behind the mayhem — past and present — remains fairly obvious. The plot lopes rather than races to the finish. Gambling metaphors abound, and sexual doings have a distinctly equine tone. But Roberts's style has a fresh, contemporary snap that gets the story past its own worst excesses.
Pub Date: June 13, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14059-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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