Young woman who survives a devastating plane crash with her body intact—and her memory wiped clean—struggles to piece together her complicated past.
Waking up in an Iowa hospital surrounded by beeping machines and people she does not know, Nell Slattery soon discovers she is a very lucky girl. She was found, along with hunky young actor Anderson Carroll, still strapped to her seat in a rural field where a passenger jet went down. She and Anderson were the only two to live. The daughter of the famous and reclusive painter Francis Slattery, Nell is told that she has a husband, Peter, and runs a Manhattan gallery with her pretty younger sister, Rory. She remembers nothing. It emerges that she and Peter were briefly separated after he had a one-nightstand with a co-worker, and she and Rory were not speaking before her fateful flight. Still, under the well-meaning ministrations of her new-agey mom, Nell returns to New York (and Peter) while ignoring the sinking feeling that she isn’t hearing the whole story. Back home she is dismayed to learn from various sources that she was previously a buttoned-up control freak with a wardrobe full of neutral colors. That is a far cry from the “fabulous” person she was hoping for. She was also a promising musician, who gave it all up after her father abandoned the family in her teens. Her father’s shadow looms large over Nell, and finding out more about him is part of the reason she allows a reality TV show to tell her story, against everyone’s better judgment. That makes sense, since it turns out that everyone in Nell’s inner circle has something to hide, and it is up to her to find the truth on her own. So she enlists Anderson, who has been self-medicating his post-crash PTSD with supermodels and booze, on a road trip to a small town that just might be the key to everything—if she can only remember where it is. Scotch (Time of My Life, 2009, etc.) crafts a plausible story, complete with a capable and prickly protagonist, that doesn't resort to any movie-of-the-week amnesia clichés. A dry-eyed modern take on healing and forgiveness.
Pub Date: April 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15758-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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
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.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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