A book that will likely hold the interest of cycling enthusiasts despite serious flaws.
In Hutchinson’s (Twisted Trails, 2015) short novel, a teenager struggles with the sullied legacy of his athlete father.
Andrew Gamble was the most successful professional cyclist the sport had ever seen, a living legend. His fame crumbled into infamy, though, when he was caught in a scandal involving performance-enhancing drugs while competing in France. Instead of facing up to his mistake, Gamble fled, abandoning his wife and 12-year-old son, Connor; he then disappeared without a trace. Connor was taken in by his uncle, Neal, the owner of a well-known bicycle shop called Modest Cycles. Five years later, Connor has taken up cycling despite the long shadow of his father’s notoriety. The sport is apparently in Connor’s blood, and he enthusiastically commits to it; he also becomes obsessed with a talented, masked rider whom he’s convinced is his father (“a masked man who wins races but never shows up for the prize”). Meanwhile, Darwin Camot, an author famous for a bestselling book about cycling, is sentenced to community service after a run-in with the law, and he tries to use this misstep as an opportunity to reform a wayward life. Hutchinson writes with a deep love and knowledge of the sport and vividly brings MacAskill, Rhode Island, to life—a fictional small town essentially founded by and for cycling devotees. But although the narrative is structured around the sport, the principal themes transcend it; in different ways, both Connor and Darwin are in search of elusive redemption. This is a very brief work—more a novella than a full-fledged novel—and the story unfolds too quickly for it to develop more than a patina of emotional authenticity. Connor’s angst rings truest, as he paradoxically tries to emulate a father whom he holds in contempt: “ ‘My dad's not innocent,’ Connor confessed. ‘He was a cheater and a drug user. The Feds think he fled to Mexico. I hope he never comes back.’ ” However, the remaining characters seem underdeveloped, and although Andrew is, in many ways, the fulcrum of the whole tale, he frustratingly remains an enigma. Overall, the book wonderfully depicts its sport, but it falls short as both mystery and emotional drama.
A book that will likely hold the interest of cycling enthusiasts despite serious flaws.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-76335-3
Page Count: 134
Publisher: Twisted Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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