An often moving account of abuse and second chances, although its stiff prose sometimes gets in the way.
In LaFrey’s somber debut novel, a young girl, her baby brother, and her “walking disaster” of a mother search for a new place to call home.
Young Rita only sees her mom, Coral, on Christmases and birthdays. She spends the rest of the year with her grandparents, who took her in after Coral—who wasted her teen years skipping school, partying, and serving a stint in juvenile detention—abandoned her newborn daughter and first husband. Rita’s grandmother proves to be an affectionate, stabilizing guardian, but her grandfather, scarred by a car accident, keeps the family on edge with his mood swings and physically abusive behavior. When Grandma dies, Coral returns to care for her daughter; she also has a new baby boy, Toby. After they’re evicted from their apartment, they wander from one makeshift home to another, including the basement of a distant great-aunt, a dilapidated former motel, and a low-income housing complex whose shady neighbors tempt Coral to return to her pot-smoking, promiscuous ways. That leaves the family “stuck in an old car with a half tank of gas, twenty bucks…and no place to go,” so they head west to Nevada to stay with Bart, a pen-pal whom Coral hopes will be her boyfriend. As told from Rita’s perspective, the book maintains an eerily detached tone that’s most effective when detailing the family’s cycle of abuse: “Right then, I was too happy to be very cautious around my mom, even though she had just punched me in the face several days earlier, over something she imagined I had done.” Other times, the prose takes too much time to say not quite enough. Too many adverb-laden sentences (“Abruptly, I sighed deeply before grudgingly making my way over to the fence”) slow down the narrative’s momentum and distract from its emotional center. The story ends rather suddenly, but LaFrey plans to continue the saga of Rita, Coral, and Toby in the next volume of her Fateful Consequences series.
An often moving account of abuse and second chances, although its stiff prose sometimes gets in the way.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1480809086
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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