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THE SKY IS FAR AWAY

Name: THE SKY IS FAR AWAY
Author: Brooks Wright
ISBN: 978-1-36-730368-3

by Brooks Wright ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 11, 2016

An often provocative compilation that shows remarkable range.

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In Wright’s debut collection of short stories, desperate characters look for answers to pressing questions and bump up against life’s disinterest in providing them.

There is an impressive variety of characters in these tales. Young people from middle America break windows, buy sextants, or join the circus. Grown men with checkered military histories look for moral resolve in diplomatic work and comfort in routinely shined shoes. Some stories take place in developing countries, where child soldiers are dosed with drugs and orphans run away from villages in search of birth mothers. Others feature motorcyclists taking pit stops at gig jobs and small-town dive bars. Despite the collection’s variety, however, there’s also a strong, unifying thread throughout: all the characters seem to exist in what Wright describes as “that moment between budding and fading when the truth of everything unfolds right in front of you.” Younger characters at once delight in escape fantasies and face disappointing realities. Older ones grapple with attempts to remedy past errors and are humbled by the ways in which their hard-earned principles fail them. The stories ask: where does one go to figure things out? To war, to church, to peace work, to the road? The book doesn’t offer an answer, but it does force readers to experience the disquiet of confronting the question. In addition to skillfully sustaining such philosophical tension, Wright has a knack for rendering desolate landscapes and depicting spirited characters, which makes for poignant juxtapositions, and he also shows a natural ear for cadence. That said, the prose can feel imprecise at times, which weakens its impact: “And when he foretold her future, as when he threatened to make her disappear, his magic was no magic at all, but sorcery.”

An often provocative compilation that shows remarkable range.

Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-36-730368-3

Page Count: 269

Publisher: Blurb

Review Posted Online: March 2, 2018

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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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.