Valdes-Rodriguez lays on the irony with a trowel and makes the same points repeatedly: people with Spanish surnames come...
God has nothing on Valdes-Rodriguez—she created her first novel in a mere six days!
Touted as the Hispanic counterpart to Terry McMillan by handlers eager to cash in on demographics! Proud possessor of a legendary temper and deeply resentful of ethnic stereotypes that nonetheless made her a fortune! (The Dirty Girls Social Club, 2003, made the New York Times bestseller list and was optioned by Jennifer Lopez’s production company!) Now comes Valdes-Rodriguez’s second, set in Los Angeles, where Dallas-born Alexis manages a popular Mexican band called Los Chimpances del Norte and dreams of bigger things. Marcella, half-Dominican, half-French, and raised in Santa Barbara, is a gorgeous actress tired of playing whores and maids and still hoping for her big break. Olivia Flores, survivor of a childhood Salvadoran death-squad attack, lives in the racially mixed neighborhood of Echo Park and wonders whether she’s raising her young son right. Her philandering husband seems to have lost interest, perhaps thanks to Olivia’s dowdy appearance and Frida Kahlo–esque intensity. Burning question: Will Hollywood ever buy Olivia’s dramatic screenplay about El Salvador? Hell, no. Alexis has no luck convincing the powerful pinheads who rule movieland, but Marcella scratches up the cash to get the script produced via a financial connection with her creepy, child-porn-loving uncle—and chica, everything changes in a few implausible seconds. Looks like the threesome has the world on a string at last—but tragedy awaits! Alexis’s true love, Goyo, a Cuban-born music star, is shot! The culprit: a disgruntled journalist dumped by Alexis earlier in the story. Despite his whitey-white name and skin, Daniel Mehegan is a ridiculous wannabe who affects gangsta-pimp-hip-hop-star ways and walks while he cooks up a bogus tale of drug smuggling that implicates Alexis. Happy ending, though.
Valdes-Rodriguez lays on the irony with a trowel and makes the same points repeatedly: people with Spanish surnames come from different places (and they hate to be called Hispanic), American racism is endemic, and clueless white people never get the slang right.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-33234-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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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