THE LITTLE OLD LADY WHO BROKE ALL THE RULES

Name: THE LITTLE OLD LADY WHO BROKE ALL THE RULES
Author: Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg
ISBN: 978-0-06-244797-5

by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2016

A merry, lighthearted caper.

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Could prison really be worse than a retirement home? Five senior citizens plan the perfect crime to find out.

Martha Andersson has had it with the prisonlike atmosphere at Diamond House Retirement Home. Bad food, limited coffee, and no exercise spell trouble for this spry old woman. With the help of a generous supply of cloudberry liqueur, she recruits her friends into forming The League of Pensioners, bent on committing a crime worthy of incarceration. Perhaps most helpful for Martha’s purposes: nurse Barbara, the ambitious manager of Diamond House. Barbara has her romantic sights set on Ingmar Mattson, the penny-pinching director of the retirement home, and her eagerness to please him leads to the economizing that pushes Martha and her cronies toward a life of crime in the first place—but when Ingmar sweeps Barbara away, it leaves Martha and her cronies the perfect opportunity to misbehave. Brains sorts out the technical details, while Rake and Christina act as henchmen, and Anna-Greta foots much of the bill. Their victimless jewel and art heists, however, soon implode under a series of unexpected obstacles. Instead of hyperbolic, mustache-twirling villains, Ingelman-Sundberg (The Little Lady Who Struck Lucky Again, 2015, etc.) deftly orchestrates the twists and turns in the plot through the foibles of real life, including an overly zealous housekeeper, a vaguely menacing convict, a lazy pair of crewmen, and police officers whose ageism blinds them to the clues right under their noses. Once caught, the pensioners quickly learn much from their fellow inmates—the next crime will certainly come off without a hitch. The first of the League of Pensioners series translated from the Swedish, Ingelman-Sundberg’s tale captures the rebelliousness percolating just under the surface of ignored, shuffled away elderly folks, although the simplistic prose sounds a bit paternalistic at times.

A merry, lighthearted caper.

Pub Date: July 12, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-06-244797-5

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE OLD LADY BEHAVING BADLY
by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg ; translated by Rod Bradbury

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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

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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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.