Here, Rice varies the seasoning for her famous dish: the damnation of immortality. Her new tale, a kind of B-picture novel, is a cross between Karloff's The Mummy, a comic strip, and a gothic romance. Rather than the cloth-of-purple-velvet of the first Lestate novel (Interview with a Vampire), Rice herein spools out gauzy underwriting whose thinness just bastes her story to the page. The virgin heroine is Julie Stratford, the sought-after daughter of a retired shipping magnate who has taken up his hobby full-time: Egyptology. On page one her father discovers the cursed tomb of Ramses the Second—who somehow has been entombed in a site inscribed with Roman and Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphs from the period of Cleopatra—a thousand years after the death of Ramses! Indeed, Ramses, who mastered the elixir of immortality, would return to life from time to time to help out a bewildered Pharaoh when Egypt was in trouble. Unfortunately, he fell for Cleopatra, but she only wanted him to grant immortality to Antony. Now Julie's father is murdered by her besotted rotter of a cousin, who uses a poison from the tomb, and Julie becomes independently wealthy. She takes Ramses' casket (on its way to the British Museum) to her fancy London home—where Ramses springs back to health to save Julie from her murderous cousin. Ramses is superhumanly intelligent, strong, royal, and indestructible, and Rice dangles Julie's virginity under his nose for better than half the book. Ramses' adventures in 1930's London are fairly amusing, as is his return to Cairo. When Ramses recovers the body of Cleopatra from Nile mud and gives her corpse the elixir, he awakens a monster who is nonetheless Julie's chief rival (Julie and Cleo meet in the powder room at the opera). Should Julie drink the awful elixir and join Ramses in the damnation of immortality? There is no question about Rice losing any fans with this lightsome, almost chirpily horrorless horror romance: she won't. Meanwhile, more adventures of Ramses are planned.
Pub Date: June 1, 1989
ISBN: 0345369947
Page Count: -
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1989
PERSPECTIVES
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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