A quasi-humorous novel and field guide for broken-hearted adolescents.
In Aloi’s debut novel, a young man struggles to decide whether to stay with his girlfriend or try to sleep with many other girls.
Vincent Wing—call him “Wing,” everybody else does—is a typical misogynistic teen, obsessed with sex but terrified of commitment with his girlfriend Clara. The problem is that he’s also (maybe) in love with the enchanting Maggie. She has certain physical features that draw our randy hero, although, to be fair, she’s hardly the only girl Wing’s age whose prominent features elicit his full-tilt, testosterone-fueled lust spiral. Such juvenile reduction of women and girls to sex objects is a major bonding point for Wing and his friends, who have names such as Hot Dog, Figs, Chink, the Shit, Monkey, the Bull and Nails. In fact, Aloi devotes much of the novel to describing their dehumanizing dialogue in what can best be described as a boys-will-be-boys tone, which does little to generate compassion for the narrator or much interest in his plight. The plot, such as it is, revolves around a much-anticipated senior trip to Porto Seguro, Brazil. While there, Wing has the opportunity to seduce copious women, but, of course, his heart belongs to Clara. Will they or won’t they get back together? The minor dramas of adolescent sexual politics may make for an intriguing lived experience, but it takes a skilled hand, often lacking here, to pull it off on the page. The real drama is whether or not the painfully self-aware Wing will ever realize that sexist vernacular isn’t the magic key to a woman’s heart (or body). Comedy can do much to illuminate the human condition, but Wing’s and his friends’ jokes never move beyond slut-shaming and gay-baiting to get at deeper truth, which is unfortunate. Aloi’s prose has the potential to be quite strong, and at its best, it comes through crisply: “She went back clumsily to talking to the rugger, though he looked like he might as well have been a pair of headphones.” In the final estimation, however, this story of Wing and his friends seems as anachronistic as its pop-culture references.
A quasi-humorous novel and field guide for broken-hearted adolescents.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1492893790
Page Count: 264
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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