Enjoyable (and a little predictable) summer fare.
Three Southern Belles wreak havoc in the lives of their cheating husbands in this light, likable debut.
Good manners and good breeding are one and all in small town Ithaca, Ga., making it hard for a lady to get a little breathing room. That’s what wild child Eadie Boone has been fighting for all her life. Eadie, who spent her childhood in a trailer park and now shares an antebellum mansion with husband Trevor Boone, is blindsided when he announces plans to marry his secretary. Trevor’s sanctimonious law partner Charles Broadwell, meanwhile, has no intention of leaving his little wife—he’s spent too long browbeating meek Nita (who is secretly addicted to the raunchiest of romance novels) to train someone new. And finally there is Lavonne; oblivious that husband Leonard (third partner in the prestigious Boone and Broadwell law firm) is hiding his assets to better swindle her when he gets around to filing for divorce. One night after the firm’s annual garden party, the three friends discover that their husbands’ yearly hunting trip to Montana has included the comfort of call girls. They decide on revenge, and so unfurls a complicated plan requiring female impersonators, the sale of house and goods and Ithaca’s best wives-only divorce attorney. For Eadie, this is a bittersweet scheme, because though Trevor has cheated on her (and she on him), the two are as perfect together as any couple could be. And while Lavonne could care less about leaving shlumpy old Leonard, it is proper Nita who surprises all by falling in love with Jimmy Lee Motes, a sexy young carpenter. Though the novel has its fair share of conventional devices (of our heroines, one is wild, one sensible, one shy) and uplifting female bonding, it also has some genuinely hilarious moments (particularly during the lawyers ill-fated hunting trip) and characters that would make good friends.
Enjoyable (and a little predictable) summer fare.Pub Date: May 16, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6367-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
The previous books of this author (Devil of a State, 1962; The Right to an Answer, 1961) had valid points of satire, some humor, and a contemporary view, but here the picture is all out—from a time in the future to an argot that makes such demands on the reader that no one could care less after the first two pages.
If anyone geta beyond that—this is the first person story of Alex, a teen-age hoodlum, who, in step with his times, viddies himself and the world around him without a care for law, decency, honesty; whose autobiographical language has droogies to follow his orders, wallow in his hate and murder moods, accents the vonof human hole products. Betrayed by his dictatorial demands by a policing of his violence, he is committed when an old lady dies after an attack; he kills again in prison; he submits to a new method that will destroy his criminal impulses; blameless, he is returned to a world that visits immediate retribution on him; he is, when an accidental propulsion to death does not destroy him, foisted upon society once more in his original state of sin.
What happens to Alex is terrible but it is worse for the reader.
Pub Date: Jan. 8, 1962
ISBN: 0393928098
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1962
SEEN & HEARD
Here, after last year's Of Love and Shadows, the tale of a quirky young woman's rise to influence in an unnamed South American country—with a delightful cast of exotic characters, but without the sure-handed plotting and leisurely grace of Allende's first—and best—book, The House of the Spirits (1985). When little Eva Luna's mother dies, the imaginative child is hired out to a string of eccentric families. During one of her periodic bouts of rebellion, she runs away and makes friends with Huberto Naranjo, a slick little street-kid. Years later, when she's in another bind, he finds her a place to stay in the red-light district—with a cheerful madame, La Senora, whose best friend is Melesio, a transvestite cabaret star. Everything's cozy until a new police sergeant takes over the district and disrupts the accepted system of corruption. Melesio drafts a protesting petition and is packed off to prison, and Eva's out on the street. She meets Riad Halabi, a kind Arab merchant with a cleft lip, who takes pity on her and whisks her away to the backwater village of Agua Santa. There, Eva keeps her savior's sulky wife Zulema company. Zulema commits suicide after a failed extramarital romance, and the previously loyal visitors begin to whisper about the relationship between Riad Halabi and Eva. So Eva departs for the capital—where she meets up with Melesio (now known as Mimi), begins an affair with Huberto Naranjo (now a famous rebel leader), and becomes casually involved in the revolutionary movement. Brimming with hothouse color, amply displayed in Allende's mellifluous prose, but the riot of character and incident here is surface effect; and the action—the mishaps of Eva—is toothless and vague. Lively entertainment, then, with little resonance.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1988
ISBN: 0241951658
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1988
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