A remarkably sweet and affecting tale of inner growth.
Unlucky-in-love Manhattan art conservationist faces her biggest fear when called upon to deliver a speech at a family event.
Despite having one of the coolest jobs in the universe—restoring paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—Hope McNeill has a low-grade case of the blues. Woefully mismatched with her conservative hedge-fund-manager boyfriend Evan, and distracted by a debilitating crush on an attractively aloof (and spoken for) colleague, she feels, at 31, like a passive observer in her own life. Her greatest source of comfort, other than repeatedly watching her favorite Zoloft commercial on TV, is escaping to Central Park’s Pug Hill. A bucolic gathering spot for owners of the breed, Pug Hill stands for all things good and positive to Hope, and the fact that she goes there without a dog of her own helps push the point that she is due for a change. And change she gets when her parents ask her to give a speech at their 40th anniversary party on Long Island. Paralyzed by even the thought of public speaking, but not wanting to let her family down, she says yes. As if that pressure was not enough, Hope’s older, prettier, spoiled sister Darcy will also be there with her beau, C.P. (Crested Possum), an affected young man with Native-American pretensions who is trying to convince Darcy to move to a commune. To prepare herself, Hope enrolls in a public-speaking class at The New School. There she bonds with her eccentric classmates, as well as the requisite hot guy, and comes to terms with some of the neuroses and bad habits that have kept her yearning for far too long. Along the way, she learns to forgive her family and herself and finds her confidence. Pace (If Andy Warhol Had a Girlfriend, 2005) has invented an emotionally complex and winning heroine, even if the long, loving descriptions of pugs might try the reader’s patience.
A remarkably sweet and affecting tale of inner growth.Pub Date: May 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-425-20971-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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