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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
Categories: GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
27
GET IT
Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2021 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
