Pathos plus characters who are puppets of fate equals a pleasant melodrama.
In Diamond’s debut, a random series of events leads to five adrift people tangled up in each other’s lives, with sometimes-disastrous consequences.
Susan Moore, Will Moore, Mark Ready, and Ella Weyland are all lost. Susan suspects that her husband is cheating on her. Will’s a philanderer all right and engaged in some very dirty business dealings besides. Mark is 28 and rudderless, seeing only his way to the next drink or fix. Ella can’t hold down a job so instead turns to men. Their lives collide when Susan decides to hire Warren Lane, a sleazy private detective who divides his time equally between blackmailing and investigating. When a mix-up leads Susan to accidentally hire Mark to investigate her husband instead of Warren, events begin a downward spiral. Suddenly Mark is sleeping with both Will’s mistress and his wife. Instead of going back home to try to restart her modeling career, Ella is staying put, trying yet again to find herself in a relationship. Will has no idea how to extricate himself from shady deals that have gotten to be far more complicated than he can handle. And everyone thinks it’s Warren’s fault. These encounters with pain, hope, and loss make the book engaging. Almost every reader will relate in some way to the protagonists’ sense of being adrift and unsure of where to go. Ella sums up this universal feeling when she tells Mark that he is, “A kind person, with a good heart. Who’s a little lost. Like me.” When books tap into themes like this, however, there is an expectation that they will offer up insight about how we detangle ourselves from such situations, or even how we don’t. It’s a bit of a letdown, then, when the characters don’t actually deal with their problems, which are, for the most part, magically solved. Not quite deus ex machina but close. It makes for a story that is sweet but not necessarily satisfying.
Pathos plus characters who are puppets of fate equals a pleasant melodrama.Pub Date: May 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9963507-0-9
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Stolen Time Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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