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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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THE SHINING

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 28, 1976

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A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).

The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....

Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.

Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976

ISBN: 0385121679

Page Count: 453

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
NEVER FLINCH
by Stephen King

- BOOK REVIEW
YOU LIKE IT DARKER
by Stephen King

- BOOK REVIEW
HOLLY
by Stephen King

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Carrie Turns 40

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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.