Thoughtful travelogue whose terrain includes the mother/daughter minefield.
A college student journeys to Panama to track down the father she never knew in this debut novel from Henríquez (Come Together, Fall Apart, 2006).
The product of an adulterous affair between a military wife and a Panama Canal worker, Miraflores (Mira) Reid was raised by single mom Catherine to believe that her biological father had no interest in being a part of her life. Mira is shocked, then, to discover a stash of letters testifying to Gatun Gallardo’s passionate yearning to be with her and her mother; it was Catherine who decided they should be apart. Unfortunately, confronting Mom is not really an option, since she is suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s and becoming more helpless each day. Anxious to find out more about Gatun’s world, Mira hires a health aide to look after Catherine, takes a leave from school and jets down to Panama to find him. Shortly after arriving in the tropical splendor of Central America, she meets a semi-employed young charmer named Danilo all too eager to help out the pretty tourist. His uncle Hernán also takes a liking to her, in a more paternal way, and she stays with the two bachelors while hitting one dead end after another. Danilo, it turns out, knows more than he lets on, and Mira’s poignant discovery of what actually happened to her dad complicates their burgeoning relationship. Back in Chicago, Mira has to deal with her mother’s worsening condition and her own lingering anger over the family life they could have had. It is a lot for a young person to handle, as Mira is forced to face her fears and learn from Catherine’s mistakes. The talented Henríquez writes plenty of soaring passages, and Danilo is a wonderful character; but like its conflicted heroine, the novel seems unsure whether it belongs in Chicago or Panama.
Thoughtful travelogue whose terrain includes the mother/daughter minefield.Pub Date: April 16, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59448-855-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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