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BOMBAY TALKIE

Name: BOMBAY TALKIE
Author: Ameena Meer
ISBN: 1-85242-325-0

by Ameena Meer ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1994

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From first novelist Meer, an uneven whirl with India's brat pack as they try to find themselves—sexually and culturally—in the bright lights of big cities like Bombay, Paris, and New York. Young American-born Sabah's search in India for identity, heritage, and just maybe a husband provides Meer with a loose framework for highlighting the cultural dissonance experienced by today's ``Indibrats.'' Like their European counterparts, they are poor little rich kids seeking sensation and sexual adventure in discos, gay bars, and updated versions of traditional stag evenings with ``nautch'' dancers—in which the nautch girls are boys. Sabah, the daughter of affluent immigrants, has grown up more American than Indian, though her parents have maintained close ties with fellow immigrants and with their family back home. Her best friend, Rani, returned to India when her mother divorced her American father. As Sabah, now a college graduate, leaves America and sometime lover Rob, her Uncle Jimmy, a famous Indian film star and singer, sets off from Bombay to join son Adam, who is supposed to be working in a Paris bank. Once in India, Sabah meets up again with Rani, a successful model but unhappy wife, only to lose her in a bizarre accident. She also socializes with jaded Indibrats and stays with a beloved grandma who serves good food and equally good advice. Uncle Jimmy and his son are not so fortunate: Sexually confused Adam flees his father and follows lover Marc to New York; Uncle Jimmy suffers a heart attack. The cousins' parallel journeys finally intersect—too neatly—in New York as Sabah, who has come home even more confused about herself, accidentally meets Adam, seriously injured while carousing with friends. A former journalist, Meer has an eye for detail and setting, but her characters and their lives are thin constructs—the habituÇs of glossy mags rather than solid novels.

Pub Date: July 1, 1994

ISBN: 1-85242-325-0

Page Count: 280

Publisher: Serpent’s Tail

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994

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.