GABRIEL’S EYE

Name: GABRIEL’S EYE
Author: C.W. Smith
ISBN: 0-9701525-0-7

by C.W. Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

In a work lacking the mildest frisson, full of routine transgressions by cutout characters who extract nothing more than...

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This hopeless dead-zone of fictional interest spends 350 pages on the astonishing tale of a student falling in love, sleeping with, and then killing himself over, his art teacher.

But there you have it. Susan is a blond, vivacious 28-year-old Dallas art teacher, popular with all the kids and naively alluring to boot. Jeff is the shy new charge who stumbles into her classroom looking like the Calvin Klein underwear guy. He is sexually inexperienced, new to the school, and ill-at-ease socially. His rich dad lives on the hill and rarely visits; his psychotic, Bible-thumping mom coddles her boy to the point of suffocation. For her part, Susan, lashed to an unsatisfying eight-year relationship with Curt, an architect, blanches at Jeff’s emotional remoteness and his obsession with work. Perhaps as relief, perhaps as a more exciting alternative, she is also trying to finish a thesis about the angel Gabriel's temptation of the Madonna, and spends some time—in her author's most cynical move—talking about the aesthetic, non-carnal pleasures of the flesh. Meanwhile, student and teacher flirt, they do life studies, they kiss, they feel guilt and longing, they make love. And that's about it, except that one of Jeff's dastardly friends has videotaped the encounter, leading the young Adonis to kill himself in anguish. Jeff's mom is good and angry, and Susan goes into therapy.

In a work lacking the mildest frisson, full of routine transgressions by cutout characters who extract nothing more than obligatory emotions from their uninteresting situations in life, Smith (Understanding Women, 1998, etc.) has stretched the definition of "unimaginative" to bracing new lengths.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-9701525-0-7

Page Count: 352

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
STEPLINGS
by C.W. Smith

- BOOK REVIEW
HUNTER'S TRAP
by C.W. Smith

- BOOK REVIEW
LETTERS FROM THE HORSE LATITUDES
by C.W. Smith

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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

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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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.