Mothers of 18-year-olds may smile in recognition occasionally, but this is really weak.
Second novel from the author of Ready to Fall (2000), this time a low-wattage domestic comedy about a woman adjusting to her first-born’s freshman year in college.
Boston suburbanite March Monroe dropped out of college over 20 years ago to follow her then boyfriend/now husband Jeff to grad school, and she’s led a comfortable domestic life ever since, running typical women’s businesses (party planner, exercise trainer, life coach) and raising Olivia and Jackson. Now that Olivia is starting her freshman year at BU, March follows Jeff’s suggestion and enrolls at the local community college as a returning student. As part of her college curriculum, March takes on an internship at a local radio station. Who should March run into her first day at WQBM but Olivia, also applying for an internship. Olivia acts less than thrilled to see Mom, especially since March has neglected to mention that she’s back in school. Many readers, women in particular, will find March’s narration both annoyingly whiny and self-congratulatory. For all her good-natured complaining, her life is pretty TV-sitcom-perfect. Sure there are annoyances: The family pets get sick; Jackson eats junk food; Jeff doesn’t listen as well as he could, though better than most (plus he buys groceries and gives neck rubs). As for Olivia, there are no lurking problems with sex, drinking, or even identity crises—unless you count a wisdom tooth inflammation. That she’s aloof from, and easily embarrassed by, March doesn’t make for great drama. The plot, such as it is, centers on the mother-daughter radio show March and Olivia end up hosting for a good-looking radio producer with whom March carries on a very mild and brief flirtation. Each chapter begins with a cutesy multiple-choice quiz joke on mothers: hence the title.
Mothers of 18-year-olds may smile in recognition occasionally, but this is really weak.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03330-8
Page Count: 7
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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
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
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