A delightfully sweet drama about friendship and remembrance.
In their twilight years, two best friends, both World War II veterans, confront their mortality in this debut novel.
Nearly Kelly and Earl Johansen both grew up in Campbell, Iowa—a sleepy town where the top employer is a chicken processing plant—and have been best friends for most of their lives. As kids, they shared a penchant for mischief; Nearly was raised by a single mother and endured prejudice, due to his Native American heritage, and Earl’s father was cruelly abusive. They both served in the second world war, during which they stormed Normandy at the same time, although they didn’t realize it until later. Now they’re both elderly, and Nearly lives in a veterans home, his body ravaged by time and diabetes. Earl visits him there often, and spends most of the rest of his time in solitude, dining on TV dinners in the evening. One day, Marlene Goodhue—a long-standing native of Campbell—invites Earl over for dinner. (They briefly dated when they were younger.) She’s hosting her teenage grandniece, Laurie, who’s grieving the loss of her father a year-and-a-half ago. Earl and Laurie form an unlikely but tender friendship, sweetly portrayed by first-time novelist Reed. The elderly man takes Laurie to meet Nearly, who’d recently confessed his deepest regret to Earl: When he returned to Campbell from the war, he wanted to proclaim his arrival on the town’s public address system, but Earl talked him out of it. Laurie tries to convince the two seniors to head to the public works building to perform one last playful act of devilment. Reed poignantly captures the happy languor of small-town life, buoyed more by familiarity and nostalgia than adventure. The author’s prose is simple and bare, and she effortlessly draws her characters with impressive authenticity. She offers up too many subplots, though, creating a skein that’s impossible to disentangle in such a short novel. For example, Earl anxiously frets over a visit from his younger brother, an accomplished writer whom he hasn’t seen in years—but this storyline, which initially seems significant, is mostly neglected. Nevertheless, the story as a whole is affecting, thanks in part to the author’s light touch.
A delightfully sweet drama about friendship and remembrance.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9654862-0-0
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Turtlecub Productions, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2018
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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