A contemporary romantic soufflÇ: boy meets girl, girl already has fiancÇ, girl dumps fiancÇ, boy dumps girl. Bartolomeo’s witty debut novel embraces the pitfalls and pratfalls of modern romance as they assail Diana Campanella, who’s never wanted anything but some peace and quiet. Which is what she thought she had with Philip, a high-powered D.C. attorney with Mayflower roots. Their three-year engagement, however, has turned into the monotony of married life, without even the redeeming fun of a wedding and honeymoon to look back on. To compound the depressing effect of Diana’s relationship, her beloved vintage clothing boutique seems to be failing; it’s likely she—ll soon have to go back to her Washington desk job promoting the benefits of nuclear energy. And then into her life walks Harry Sandburg, handsome, charming, basically soulmate material. A friend of her sister Cynthia’s (an infamous New York lingerie model involved with a married soap opera star), Harry has just relocated to D.C. after a messy separation from his wife. He proceeds to sweep Diana off her feet just as Philip is ready for the big commitment’setting a date for the wedding. Two-timing Philip isn—t easy for good Catholic girl Diana, but on the wings of Harry’s love comes further good fortune—with Cynthia’s help, her shop is becoming the toast of the town. Then, just as Diana’s life seems to be fitting together—Harry’s passion, the shop’s success, Philip finally dumped—Harry goes back to New York to reconcile with his wife. Will a repentant Diana marry Philip? Will she fight for Harry? Will she stop bickering with her crotchety Italian pop? Can a girl find happiness in the backwaters of Washington? Chances are that she can, and the finale has our heroine looking fine in the arms of true love. Amusing, but so light that if you breathe on the page, the words will fly right off.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83977-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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