An often powerful novel about courage and integrity in the face of hate.
In this gripping novel of romance and social consciousness, a white California teenager encounters the effects of racial prejudice in the segregated South of the 1950s.
In 1986 Los Angeles, Hannah Ross is devastated by the death of her father, but her world is turned upside down when her mother, Catherine, decides to share some long-buried family history. Most of the novel that follows takes place in the summer of 1955, as Catherine, a teenage college student, accompanies her father, Ben, to his childhood home in Arkansas to help her recently widowed grandmother, Mama Rae. Ben hasn’t visited the South in more than a decade, largely due to a desire to protect his children from their grandfather’s racist attitudes. The casual cruelty of whites in the Jim Crow South comes as a shock to Catherine, and she soon draws attention for her refusal to participate in it. She also finds herself irresistibly drawn to Jimmy Emerson, the college-aged African-American son of her grandmother’s housekeeper, Sally; he’d been her playmate during past childhood visits to her grandparents’ farm. Despite Ben’s, Mama Rae’s, and Sally’s warnings, they pursue their youthful attraction, and the life-shattering consequences will have repercussions for generations. Moose (Berkeley U.S.A., 1981, etc.) is a compelling storyteller, and this one unfolds with page-turning urgency as she paints a convincingly chilling portrait of white supremacy in a small Southern town. However, some of the characters here seem a bit too good to be true, while others are mere caricatures of evil, so readers looking for a more nuanced cultural study may be disappointed. Even so, readers will genuinely care about Catherine, Jimmy, and their families; the transformation of Mama Rae after her husband’s death is a delight, and the ending is satisfying without tying up its loose ends too neatly. A thoughtful “Author’s Note” with suggested reading about the Jim Crow South follows the text.
An often powerful novel about courage and integrity in the face of hate.Pub Date: April 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9785232-6-8
Page Count: 308
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2017
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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