A highly readable, if uneven, novel featuring characters that will be hard for readers to forget.
A woman tries to shed her troubling past with the help of friends—and fate—in this debut novel.
Glorianna is assaulted by her boyfriend, Vince, and a lecherous bar patron and winds up bloodied, face down on the pavement outside the bar. An angelic, unknown man comes to her rescue, but his presence is fleeting. Five years later, Glorianna is still with Vince, and their nomadic wanderings in a camper have led them to Corona d’Espinas, N.M. Quiet, wise Fred lives in a trailer nearby; he suffers from panic attacks, just as Glorianna always has. He introduces her to several other warm people: the spitfire waitress, Valerie; the chatty bar owner, Roy, and his mystic wife, Sonia; Roy’s handsome nephew Doug and his daughter Melanie; and Casey, the sheriff. Glorianna grows close to all of them, especially Doug, but still endures Vince’s physical and sexual attacks at night. Her new friends drop hints that she could do better than Vince, but still she returns to him, despite the revelation that Vince is seeing another woman. Doug and Glorianna continue their budding relationship, and she promises herself that she will have a new life by the new year. But in the novel’s dramatic crescendo, startling news from Glorianna’s family reveals her past secrets, provoking Vince to do his worst. Readers may have difficulty keeping track of the novel’s dozens of characters, but their dialogue and interactions are flawless, creating a warm Southwest community with just enough local color. The story’s most puzzling aspects are Glorianna’s attraction to Vince and her decision to remain in their relationship. Their tangled past isn’t fully revealed until well into the novel, and for much of the novel, Vince’s characterization isn’t particularly complex. Readers may wish that the novel had better explored why Glorianna stays with Vince, and what her life could be like without him, instead of anchoring the story in their violent relationship.
A highly readable, if uneven, novel featuring characters that will be hard for readers to forget.Pub Date: March 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1479347278
Page Count: 470
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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