Despite some shortcomings, the story is a solid page-turner sprinkled with clever observations about the nature of romantic...
Before Emma Moon ties the knot, she wants to know why her father walked out on her months after she was born.
Emma has always lived by the motto "Be the first person to jump ship." Her aversion to commitment is understandable after a lifetime with a mother who's kept her at arm’s length and a father who walked out of her life. This parental combo has left Emma with a gaping hole she feels can only be filled when she finds her father, Hunter Moon. Emma and her best friend, Liv, ditch a pre-wedding Napa getaway and head to San Francisco for an often funny paternal scavenger hunt. Fitzhenry’s plot is reminiscent of the 1996 Ben Stiller comedy flick Flirting with Disaster but lacks the heart and complexity that made the movie truly special. Through a series of too-convenient coincidences, Emma discovers secrets that rock the foundation of her past and threaten her future. Readers may buy the random run-in with a long-lost friend who reveals that fiance Sam might not be all he seems. And, OK, Liv’s ex-boyfriend could just happen to be at the same bar as Emma and Liv. But when a postcard for a Hunter Moon art show conveniently appears at just the right moment, debut novelist Fitzhenry slides quickly into eye-rolling territory. (To her credit, the author acknowledges the unlikeliness there by dubbing it “the Magic Postcard.”) It’s also hard to swallow that a character capable of such emotionally rich flashbacks to her childhood can be so one-dimensional in her analysis of present-day relationships. She's quick to label people as liars and cheats when there is clearly more nuance to situations. Still, Emma is easy to root for.
Despite some shortcomings, the story is a solid page-turner sprinkled with clever observations about the nature of romantic love.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-425-28111-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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
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