Amorality run riot, but Fleming does an expert job of glossing it over and dressing it up: rousing entertainment.
Havana, with the Batista regime crumbling, is the setting for Fleming’s well-made sequel (after Ivory Coast, 2002) about love among the ruins.
Pete Deacon may drink too much and think too little, but there's no malice in him. If he ever bothered to articulate a moral imperative, it would take the form of: Don't hurt anyone you don't absolutely have to. In fact, Pete cares about only two things: his trumpet and his woman, except that the beautiful Anita isn't his any longer. After certain disruptive events in Las Vegas (recounted in Ivory Coast), she's been appropriated, in turn, by a mobster and a tycoon: powerful men with aggressive appetites and sufficient mercenaries to guard against frustration. Now, Pete’s in Havana, has been for three years, hiding from an assortment of enemies, yearning for his lost love, and experiencing the seductive if debauched atmosphere of a betrayed Cuba buckling at the knees. He’s changed his name to Sloan (“Deacon was a guy with trouble behind him”); swapped his trumpet for the coronet (“which was almost a trumpet”), and is blowing it hot with a pretty good jazz band at the glitzy Tropicana. And then one night, of all the casinos in town, in walks Anita on the arm of Nick Calloway, the handsome, hard-edged tycoon with a surprising soft spot. It isn’t that he merely covets Anita, he adores her with an intensity matching Pete’s. Thus, a triangle: Anita and Pete, star-crossed in the great tradition, and the Gatsbylike Calloway. When Anita is kidnapped by rebels and hurried off into Fidel’s hills, an ad hoc band of very strange bedfellows forms itself into an ostensible rescue party. And then suddenly the hills are alive with secret agendas.
Amorality run riot, but Fleming does an expert job of glossing it over and dressing it up: rousing entertainment.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-30748-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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