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
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.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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