A heartfelt story of a broken family beginning to heal.
A badly fractured family suddenly faces a crisis in Laurie’s debut novel.
Sonny DeMario, a 40-something FedEx driver in Cedar City, Utah, and his wife, Sue, an office manager for a construction company, live in the same house but don’t love each other anymore. Years ago, Sonny’s relationships with his two grown children, Vincent and Veronica, nearly broke down completely. He expressed moral outrage over the revelation that Vincent was gay and went to live with his childhood friend in San Francisco, and about the fact that Veronica had a child out of wedlock with her abusive boyfriend, Ron Meskin. The current highlights of Sonny’s life are his job, his conversations with his friends, and the companionship of his 7-year-old German shepherd, Cody. When an acquaintance at the local dog park suggests they breed their dogs and sell the pups, Sonny agrees. Meanwhile, Sue pursues a lucrative offer to model for a handsome photographer. These parallel moneymaking ventures are interrupted when Ron, irate over Veronica’s overnight absence, takes their 3-year-old son, Darrin, and disappears. A distraught Sonny and Sue take the initiative in trying to find their grandson, putting up fliers, canvasing online social media sites, talking with friends of Ron in search of clues. Overall, Laurie’s novel is fast-paced, smoothly accomplished, and involving. He expertly intertwines the two main narrative strands, and along the way, he even includes an intriguing mystery involving an enigmatic old man who begins appearing to Sonny in visions, just as all the events in his life seem to go haywire at the same time. The dialogue throughout the story is believable and straightforward, and the plot’s undercurrents of uplift never feel cheap or manipulative, nor does the gradual deepening of Sonny’s empathy for his children.
A heartfelt story of a broken family beginning to heal.Pub Date: June 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9976026-4-7
Page Count: 248
Publisher: I AM Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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