Light as a breeze and about as memorable.
Hopeless girl gets swept off feet by wealthy movie producer, only to be tempted by cute but poor actor.
There are authors who can work comfortably inside the genre, giving fresh spin to the old, tired, chick-lit conventions. If only British writer Matthews (Bare Necessity, 2003, etc.) were one of them. Her London girl of the moment, Sadie Nelson, is at loose ends. Once a trader in the City, Sadie is now reduced to a lifestyle a few steps below going on the dole. Temping at a book convention, she meets Gil McCann, a Hollywood producer who just bought the rights to a hot new novel. He’s charming, devastatingly handsome, obviously loaded, and a genuinely nice guy. Having pretty much run out her string in London, Sadie doesn’t take long to accept his invitation to come see him in California, an invite that should be the gateway to a Pretty Woman life of riches and great sex. But roadblock after roadblock gets tossed in the mad new couple’s way, from Gil’s alcohol-sodden trainwreck of a soon-to-be-ex-wife to Tavis, the simply adorable actor who’s sadly pretty poor and quite possibly gay, but seems quite smitten with Sadie nonetheless. Gil and Sadie are realistically uncomfortable with each other, only having just met, of course, but just about every other element here is as artificial as Gil’s wife’s breasts. When Sadie’s not whining internally about her situation—even though within a matter of days, she’s got herself a decent job and apartment, not to mention Gil’s penchant for buying her expensive presents when yet another of their dates goes to pot—we’ve got Gil to deal with, who’s not only far too much of a human being to be a producer but talks like a girl. Matthews has a tin ear for all dialogue, but her inability to write a male character (or any character other than a young, white British woman) is especially pronounced.
Light as a breeze and about as memorable.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-059562-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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
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
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