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
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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