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MILTON'S ELEMENTS

Name: MILTON'S ELEMENTS
Author: Cordelia Strube
ISBN: 0-88910-477-8

by Cordelia Strube ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1995

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Canadian writer Strube (Alex & Zee, 1995, not reviewed) tells the story of a sensationally dysfunctional family that might give even the tabloids pause. Nothing has ever gone right for Milton, and chances are slim that they ever will. He's approaching middle age, dyslexic, and recently fired from his factory job; his only friend is retarded Winnie; his mother has always favored his older brother, Leonard; his three-year-old daughter, Ariel, was killed seven months ago in a quirky accident; and now his wife, Judith, seems ready to take a walk. No wonder that ``lately he's been thinking about killing people...Robo-cop-style,'' but then poor Milton doubts he'll ever do anything so drastic ``since he can't even kill bugs.'' And as the story, set in a gritty Canadian town near Toronto, continues, Milton's tribulations only multiply. When Judith, a grocery clerk who's been coping with grief by consulting channelers and the I Ching, flirts with another man at a party, Milton in despair hits her. She moves out, but Milton's not alone for long: Soon decorator brother Leonard, now dying from AIDS, moves in, as does sister Mandy and her two juvenile delinquent sons, all three of whom are fleeing Mandy's drunken husband Seth. Another sister, Connie, a drug addict and hooker, appears next, and then the family is completed with the arrival of their much-disliked, gun-packing mother, now recovering from bypass surgery. Milton nurses the dying Leonard and tries to cope with mother, who won't accept that Leonard's gay. A messy suicide, two gruesome deaths, and Judith's refusal to return nearly push Milton over the edge, but Mandy and sonsplus a neat self-help solutioncome to the rescue. Not badly written, but with all the unrelieved nastiness and grotesque speciousness of a TV talk showand, not surprisingly, completely unaffecting.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-88910-477-8

Page Count: 283

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.