An admirable debut.
A death in the family haunts a mother and daughter.
When Sophie Bradshaw met tall, handsome plastic surgeon Thomas Logan (a Dr. McDreamy look-alike), she told him that her father had died of a heart attack just before her high school graduation; her mother died of cancer when she was 12. She had no siblings. The truth was far different, but for Sophie, marrying Thomas gave her “a fresh start, a clean slate....No one, she’d decided, would ever know her shame, or the scandal that had ripped apart a little girl’s fairy tale.” In her briskly paced debut novel, therapist and life coach Pisel brings Sophie to a crisis point: about to turn 30, she suspects that Thomas is having an affair. And even more shattering, she receives a letter from a lawyer that draws her back into the drama she desperately wanted to flee. Sophie’s mother, Grace, is alive, in prison awaiting execution for killing her infant son, William. She was convicted of Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome, in which a parent deliberately sickens a child in order to gain attention for herself. Grace’s lawyer believes she is innocent, but appeals have run out, and he hopes only to carry out Grace’s wish to reunite with her daughter before she dies. The ticking clock propels the narrative, told in alternating chapters by Grace herself and by a narrator who relates all of Sophie’s experiences and thoughts. Thomas is facing his own crisis: one of his patients—a little girl—dies after surgery, leaving him shaken and confused. “I’ve done this procedure multiple times, and I’ve never had a bad outcome,” he tells the girls’ parents. But the “outcome,” they remind him, was their daughter, and they decide to sue. Despite some predictable plot moves and stereotypical characters (Sophie calls her tony neighbors “the synthetics”), Pisel evokes sympathy for Sophie and Grace.
An admirable debut.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-17636-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
A bloated, pointless-seeming prequel to 1985's bestselling Lonesome Dove. In his fourth book in three years, McMurtry (most recently, The Late Child, p. 417) introduces us to future heroes Woodrow Call and Gus McCrae—here, green Texas Rangers who've rashly signed on before age 20, seeking adventure in the wilds of western Texas. On their first mission, an ill-fated attempt to find a safe passage from San Antonio to El Paso, the two come face-to-face with Buffalo Hump, the fierce Comanche chief who almost single-handedly wipes out the whole Ranger troop. Adventure number two is equally doomed—an attempted assault on the far-away Mexican stronghold of Santa Fe. Before they even get to New Mexico, though, Call and Gus must endure the bleak elements, more of Buffalo Hump's abuse, the brutality of the Apaches, and finally the might of the well-trained Mexican Army. While the Rangers are being decimated, the reader is assured of the two heroes' survival. And since the rest of the Rangers are stock B-movie characters—the mournful black cook, the sullen mountain man, the prostitute with a heart of gold—there's little reason to be engaged by them. Overall, the novel's a series of mostly predictable encounters, with no underlying theme or emotional weight, whose best characters—English prisoners stuck in an El Paso leper colony—don't appear until the very end, and then only as an afterthought. In fact, the is seems so slipshoddily produced as to seem unedited, filled with continuity gaps and leaps of fictional faith, not to mention endless scenes, improbable dialogue, and countless leaden sentences: "Gus didn't seem to be particularly concerned about the prospect of Comanche capture—his nonchalant approach to life could be irksome in times of conflict." Only for blindly faithful McMurtry fans.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80753-X
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
Twenty-six tales by the 1982 Nobel Prize Winner, rearranged in roughly chronological order of writing. From the 1968 collection No One Writes to the Colonel come stories of the town of Macondo—about the much-delayed funeral of local sovereign Big Mamma, a dentist's revenge on the corrupt Mayor (extraction sans anesthetic), a priest who sees the Devil, a thief who robs the pool hall of its billiard balls. But the collection's standout—its title novella—is not included here. Likewise, the long title piece from the Leaf Storm collection (1972)—also about a Colonel—is omitted; but it does offer "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" and other beguiling fantasies. And, from 1978's Innocent Erendira And Other Stories comes an uneven mix of mystical fable and diffuse surrealism (some pieces dating, before English translation, from the 1940s or '50s). Much that's brilliant, some that's merely strange and fragmentary, and almost all enhanced by the translations of Gregory Rabassa and S. J. Bernstein.
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 1984
ISBN: 0060932686
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1984
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