Elton’s chatty, frenetic style only emphasizes the underlying sourness of this dreary little tale: it’s just not the kind of...
British funnyman Elton (Blast From the Past, 1999, etc.) offers a mostly unfunny take on the travails of infertility treatment.
Sam is a comedy producer for the BBC (a grim business, apparently), and he’s not particularly pleased when his wistful wife, Lucy, begins attempting to conceive in earnest. But rather than actually talk to each other, the spouses confide their feelings and frustrations in his-and-hers journals. Glumly contemplating a sex life dictated by the rise and fall of the mercury in an ovulation thermometer, Sam is not in the least cheered by Lucy’s alternative approaches: aromatherapy, Druidical rites, visualizations, gorilla adoption, positive thinking, and so forth. He goes along with it all, though—albeit with no success—because he loves her. The couple’s increasing desperation takes its inevitable toll on their marriage, and lots of feeble jokes about turkey basters and petri dishes don’t liven things up any. Bored and irritable, Sam decides to write a screenplay about their experience, but he betrays Lucy by cribbing the best bits from her journal without telling her. He sells the screenplay, which goes into production with Sam at the helm. When Lucy finds out, she dumps him and runs straight into the arms of a virile if vain actor who gets her pregnant at last. The actor proves to be passing fancy, but when she miscarries Lucy vows to try again—this time as a single mother, given the men she knows. Yet she and Sam reunite at the movie’s premiere and head for the chalk hills of Dover for still another odd rite, this one involving a giant chalk phallus carved into a verdant slope centuries ago.
Elton’s chatty, frenetic style only emphasizes the underlying sourness of this dreary little tale: it’s just not the kind of humor that travels well.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-33465-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Delta
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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