Page-turning inspirational fiction for the casual reader.
An inspirational writer must put her teachings to work when her husband leaves, ruining the wonderful life she has built.
Angela Hearly-Peterson had it all–a beautiful, adoring husband, a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, even a Pulitzer Prize for her bestselling inspirational memoir Wrestling With the Demons. Little does Angela know it’s all about to come crumbling down. Her husband Jackson–the beloved “moon to her sea”–has a secret gambling problem and has lost their entire fortune. In debt to Las Vegas casinos, he commits an almost unspeakable act that will send Angela’s life into a downward spiral. She flees the West Coast for her family compound on Nantucket, where she plans to end the miserable charade that her life has become. The island remains home to people who still love Angela and remember the little girl she used to be before fame and fortune struck. One man in particular has been waiting for her return. Leo, her unrequited high school boyfriend, still holds a torch for Angela and believes that they will end up together. Slowly, the motley group of islanders bands together to coax Angela back from the edge. Riveting until the end (a delightful bit of postmodernism closes the book), Courage of Fear is a suspenseful, exciting story. Boyer employs an interesting time-jump structure which contrasts Jackson and Angela’s blissful courtship with the morass of sorrow that has become their marriage. The novel is full of indelible characters who will hook enthusiastic readers. Boyer is adept at writing details that bring characters to life, i.e. manicured but chewed-down fingernails, a careful avoidance of a spot on the floor where passionate lovemaking had once occurred during happier days, etc. The book only fails at one point–the author’s stated intention to pass on advice and inspiration to readers, much in the same way the book’s protagonist helped hers. Most readers will be more absorbed by the narrative than the advice dispensed therein. However, the book remains enjoyable on many levels.
Page-turning inspirational fiction for the casual reader.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-6152-0363-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
