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
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
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.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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