Sure to transport readers to another place and time.
A collection of short stories centering on a young boy coming of age in a small fishing community during the mid-1950s in pre-Castro Cuba.
In 10 linked stories, Rodriguez charmingly conjures life in Santa Rita, a coastal town in Cuba, before Castro’s revolution. The townspeople are seen mainly through the eyes of Carlos, a young boy growing up surrounded by his colorful neighbors. Chief among them is Pedro, a homeless man who makes the wharf his home and who relates to a wide-eyed Carlos the rich history of their town. As such, the collection encompasses Santa Rita’s past and present. Pedro’s own story is a fascinating one as he narrates his youthful love for a young woman far above his station. A man of many accomplishments, he also tells Carlos about his adventure transporting aid via train to a nearby village hit hard by a hurricane and of his meeting with Ernest Hemingway during World War II, when the famous American writer and his “hooligan navy” kept watch for German U-boats hoping to sink freighters off the coast of Cuba. Carlos is featured in several stories as well, including two about his relationship with Veronica, a beautiful Jewish girl. The collection ends with Carlos’ leaving for a high school education in Havana and his emotional farewell with Pedro, a man straight out of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and who provides the book’s true beating heart. Pedro’s stories read like tall tales, whereas Carlos’ have their roots in timeless stories about youth, like Booth Tarkington’s Penrod and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Basil and Josephine Stories. Rodriguez wonderfully evokes the ’50s with references to The Old Man and The Sea, This is Cinerama and Argentinean Grand Prix champion Juan Manuel Fangio. His only flaw is in too often adding unnecessary buttons in the forms of lessons or morals at the ends of his stories.
Sure to transport readers to another place and time.Pub Date: June 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1478736981
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Outskirts Press Inc.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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
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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