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PRETTY IS AS PRETTY DOES

Name: PRETTY IS AS PRETTY DOES
Author: Alison Clement
ISBN: 1-9673701-9-1

by Alison Clement ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2001

As self-righteous and narrow-minded as the small-town characters it vilifies.

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All hell breaks loose when a silly young woman falls for a stranger passing through her claustrophobically small Illinois town.

Lucy Fooshee, Palmyra’s beauty queen, has married Bob Bybee, son of Palmyra’s second-richest farmer. Two weeks after the wedding, she enters Aunt Babe’s Café for lunch, and finds Babe’s nephew Billy working the counter while he visits the town. Their case of lust at first sight is not calmed by the fact that Billy also works as a handyman at Lucy’s mother’s house, where Lucy and Bob have dinner nightly, or the fact that Bob and his family are despicable. First-time novelist Clement, a Colorado-based elementary school librarian, clearly wants us to see Lucy as immature yet endearing, but her Lucy is spoiled and bratty. As she chases after Billy, readers are likely to find their sympathies sliding unexpectedly toward the boorish but besotted Bob. Lucy and Billy end up at the Holiday Inn in Springfield, then begin meeting regularly behind the cemetery. Everyone except Bob knows about the affair, the scandal heightened by the news that Billy is one quarter “Injun.” After Billy is run out of town (shades of watered-down Tennessee Williams), Lucy discovers she's pregnant, the locals burn crosses on her lawn, and Bob’s family rejects her. Lucy and her new baby head off in her divorce-settlement Cadillac, supposedly toward a new life of possibilities. Clement’s sense of time and place are wobbly; she never clarifies when the story takes place. Certain references, like a comparison of Lucy to Elizabeth Taylor, along with the backwardness and isolation of Palmyra’s citizens (despite living within easy driving distance of the relatively sophisticated state capital, Springfield) imply the ’50s but other touches, such as a Mexican restaurant that serves authentic chicken tacos, implies the present. And although the story's set is Illinois, Lucy narrates with a decidedly southern accent (and with grammar so bad it sounds forced).

As self-righteous and narrow-minded as the small-town characters it vilifies.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001

ISBN: 1-9673701-9-1

Page Count: 300

Publisher: MacAdam/Cage

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.