IN A DARK WOOD

Name: IN A DARK WOOD
Author: Amanda Craig
ISBN: 0-385-50262-1

by Amanda Craig ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 15, 2002

Britisher Craig’s US debut is a perspicacious relationship drama, with some nicely researched academic touches for the...

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A seething, hollowed-out, soon-to-be-divorced actor is obsessed by his dead mother’s fairy tales.

Laura Perry, the mother of narrator Benedick Hunter, was an American in 1960s London and a children’s book illustrator of some repute when she hanged herself after her handsome columnist husband left her for another woman. Benedick, nearly 40, mostly unemployed, and suspended by an emotional thread after his own novelist wife left him (with their two small children) to live with her posh publisher, stumbles again upon his mother’s North of Nowhere stories with their eerie, haunting illustrations. In his leisurely state of self-loathing and despair, he sets out to unearth the true story behind her suicide by following the shadowy lead of her grim fairy tales of innocent, virtuous girls lured into the dark wood (Craig acknowledges her debt to the work of Ellen Handler Spitz, Alison Lurie, and Marina Warner). His reckless quest takes him and his son Cosmo to the wilderness of the States, to New York City, and to the original woods of “the Carolinas,” where Craig can let fly her criticisms of American obesity, automatic cars, and fast food. While Benedick’s children are scene-stealers, the younger women in his life, including his wife and the predatory singles who call him relentlessly, are shredded maliciously. Benedick’s tempestuous moods are effectively, even amusingly, delineated, and despite his swampy self-pity (his successful father is “a wicked old bastard who has never loved me”), the reader ends up cheering for him when he meets his charming southern cousin Rose, a dead-ringer for his mother. Disastrously, Benedick learns that he suffers from manic-depression, but his bad moods, with medication, vanish like magic—rendering most disappointing the requisite hospital ending of this neatly written emotional saga.

Britisher Craig’s US debut is a perspicacious relationship drama, with some nicely researched academic touches for the literary set.

Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2002

ISBN: 0-385-50262-1

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Nan A. Talese

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.