The impact of family and place on the characters’ psyches is convincing. But the overall impact would be greater if the...
An Oprah-ready, dysfunctional family melodrama set in the contemporary Midwest.
Released from prison after serving five years for a drunk driving accident that resulted in the death of his grandmother, Winston Mabie returns to his childhood home where the rest of the Mabie family still lives: his father, a retired professor, his mother, and his two sisters—Emily, unhappily divorced with a four-year-old son and an infant daughter; and Mona, unhappily single, with an unfortunate habit of loving married men. But Winston’s return doesn’t move the story along, it doesn’t even thicken the melodrama, it just provides a place for the melodrama to pick up. Over the course of the following year, with time as the novel’s engine, a family friend dies from cancer, a family member is diagnosed with cancer, a family relative goes on birth control and still gets pregnant, and the family adjusts to Winston’s presence. Meanwhile, the plot stagnates. Present action is eclipsed by the past. For every incident and character, a history is provided, even the back-story of a Chihuahua—a story that happened before the story. The prose flows deftly in and out of each character’s consciousness, but the invention of their interior lives begins to feel contrived, labored, or just plain off. The chapter that introduces Winston, for example, a legendarily good-looking ladies’ man just released from five years of prison, fails to register any sense whatever of his libido.
The impact of family and place on the characters’ psyches is convincing. But the overall impact would be greater if the story had found its essential progression of incidents. Nelson (Nobody’s Girl, 1997, etc.), an accomplished stylist, gets at the heart of her people, while the narrative pace flutters barely above the flatline.Pub Date: June 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-83933-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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
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
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