Readers will be casting their votes for Rick—and not the guy who got away.
A harried events planner pines for the high-school heartthrob who got away, but is the feeling mutual?
Erin Edwards works for a world-class luxury resort in Virginia, coordinating lavish weddings, bar mitzvahs and birthday parties, like the Sweet 16 bash the hotel is hosting for Roxanne, the world’s brattiest teenager. Fielding Roxanne’s outrageous requests (helicopters, horses in the water park, a flock of eagles), Erin recalls her own much less entitled teenage years, overshadowed by her passion for Nate, her first lover. Although she went on to other loves and is the single mother of a daughter, she’s never found Nate’s equal in any man. Rick, her daughter’s best friend’s father, a prominent Washington, D.C., lawyer, has proposed and is waiting for an answer. There’s nothing wrong with Rick, except that he’s not...Nate. The book alternates between the mid ’80s, as the courtship of Nate and Erin charts its rocky course, and the present. Although '80s Erin can’t tamp down her longing for Nate, she still chafes at the fact that they never have a real date—instead they hang out with his Animal House–eligible contingent of friends. Nate is Romeo without the flowery speeches or depth. In the present, Roxanne refuses to believe that her ex-boyfriend can’t be somehow forced to attend her party. Witnessing Roxanne’s self-delusion leads Erin to ponder if Nate shares her nostalgia for their past. Convinced he moved away long ago, she can’t resist revisiting Nate’s former home. But as she passes the house, who should appear but Nate, slightly more grizzled. They fall back into bed without so much as a word, but then she finds his wedding ring. Should she have just let sleeping Nates lie? Although there are some trenchant social observations here, Erin’s ever-churning ruminations and regrets begin to pall. Harbison makes a vivid case for Nate’s sexual prowess but fails to illustrate any other traits that would qualify him for soul-mate-hood.
Readers will be casting their votes for Rick—and not the guy who got away.Pub Date: July 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-59910-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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