First behemoth installment (800+ pp.) in a new occult romance by Rice—now moving back into the bougainvillea and the New Orleans Garden District for her steamy new world of southern witchcraft. It's a couple of hundred pages (or more) before Rice hooks the reader and gets her major characters together; the story circles about the Mayfair family (bulking out the book are a few dozen family vignettes) and the generations of Mayfair witches who have accumulated one of the world's great fortunes while awaiting "the thirteenth"—the thirteenth witch in their succession, who will be the doorway by which a supernormal entity enters the human world and takes flesh. Dr. Rowan Mayfair—a San Francisco brain surgeon gifted with second sight, the power to heal (she foretells which cases will live before she lifts her knife), and the power to kill with her mind—was taken at birth from her Mayfair witch mother and raised by an aunt in San Francisco, and never knows until her mother dies that she is to inherit $7.5 billion. Meanwhile, alone and stormbound in her yacht, Rowan rescues a floating body from the sea, a wealthy local architect dead for an hour and being instructed by Mayfair figures in the beyond, and brings him back to life. Michael Curry now finds himself "cursed" with the power of psychometry (extrasensory fingertips) and has to wear gloves to stop the inflow of images. These two are being watched by—and then taken into the confidence of—Aaron Lightnet, a member of the Talamasca, a secret organization that for six centuries has investigated the paranormal. He warns Rowan and Michael against the Mayfair witches. An entity that has yet to achieve flesh has been passing itself through the eldest Mayfair women since the first Mayfair witch was burned at the stake in Holland. Now Rowan is pregnant by Michael, and the entity wants to become her fetus and flesh at last. The entity is by far the liveliest invention in the novel and the reader is left cliffhanging as this rather benign energy-being—fully (and erotically) empowered—is seen running off to Switzerland with Rowan. A writing mishmash, but a strong story stamps itself onto the brain.
Pub Date: Nov. 14, 1990
ISBN: 0345384466
Page Count: 1049
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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