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THREE WISHES

Name: THREE WISHES
Author: Barbara Delinsky
ISBN: 0-684-84507-5

by Barbara Delinsky ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1997

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Heartwarming, tearjerking small-town romance from veteran Delinsky (A Woman's Place, p. 8, etc.), replete with an out-of-body experience. Bree Miller, a well-liked waitress at an unbelievably good diner in Panama, Vermont, is hit by a car on a snowy night and, during surgery, ``dies'' briefly. While her heart's stopped, Bree is aware of floating above the operating table and of encountering a loving and gentle bright light. When she wakes up, she also remembers having been given three wishes—although after her third wish is granted, the deal goes, her life will be over. She also, when she wakes up, finds herself being taken care of by Tom Gates, a bestselling author in the John Grisham mold, who has come to little Panama to escape his celebrity status and to try to find himself. Although it wasn't Tom's fault, it was his car that hit Bree, and so this ``movie starhandsome'' guy now finds that the time he spends caring for Bree helps him feel better about himself. He has, in fact, given up his fast-track life out of guilt over his mother's death: He rarely visited her, and when she died (of cancer), he was sailing the Adriatic with his equally famous friends. Bree helps to make him into a much nicer guy. Indeed, he becomes a supremely thoughtful man, fetching and carrying for Bree and listening to her concerns. Eventually, they fall in love, of course, and he gives Bree a really swell diamond engagement ring. Bree finally makes her three wishes—but not very shrewdly. When the white light comes for her (she's found with a serene smile on her face), the bereft Tom manages to go on with the help of his newborn son and the loving small-town Panamanians. Delinsky rises above gag-me-with-a-spoon melodrama—though just barely.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-684-84507-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
A WEEK AT THE SHORE
by Barbara Delinsky

- BOOK REVIEW
BEFORE AND AGAIN
by Barbara Delinsky

- BOOK REVIEW
BLUEPRINTS
by Barbara Delinsky

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.