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DEBATABLE LAND

Name: DEBATABLE LAND
Author: Candia McWilliam
ISBN: 0-385-26310-4

by Candia McWilliam ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 13, 1995

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In this British import, McWilliam (A Little Stranger, 1989) imposes her florid voice on Scots and others making a Pacific journey by boat from Papeete, Tahiti. On board are three Scots: Alex, a painter who has recently ended a long relationship and has signed on to work; owner-skipper Logan; and his dissatisfied second wife, Elspeth. Also traveling are the attractive Englishwoman Gabriel, who will serve as cook, and Sandro and Nick, practiced sailors who hail from New Zealand and England, respectively. Periodically, the Scottish characters sink into long reveries about home (Alex, in particular, rethinks his past intensely), and the usual occurrences among strangers sharing close quarters take place (e.g., Logan and Gabriel sleep together). A habit of switching abruptly from one character's interior thoughts to another's without warning confuses occasionally, but it is McWilliam's descriptions that are truly problematic. Her style is like a wild animal, beautiful and powerful, but also undisciplined. She is so enamored of her own vocabulary that she often obscures very basic information, like the trip's destination. Everything is given equal weight here: Alex's memory of an Italian grocery in Edinburgh is described in the most minute detail, including a paragraph about how the butter was apportioned, for no apparent reason. Many of the similes and metaphors are stunning—a dying woman's last breath ``had come from its mouth like a saw''—but arrive so thickly that they begin to irritate with their insistence. Though graceful, unnecessary descriptions still irk. The dialogue, in particular, is creaky and laden with verbal chaff. ``In small enclosed places with highly organised finite interdependencies you can't afford to unbalance a single thing,'' Nick announces when discussing the ecological makeup of islands. Utilizing lovely literary prose is like spelling banana: You have to know when to stop.

Pub Date: March 13, 1995

ISBN: 0-385-26310-4

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Nan A. Talese

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995

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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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.