Static. Gracefully written, but, after the first few chapters, nothing builds until the uplifting (and unearned) close.
Shapiro (the memoir Slow Motion, 1998; Picturing the Wreck, 1996, etc.) returns with a “poor me” novel about a woman whose perfect family has disintegrated before her eyes.
Rachel, the classic (and classically annoying) victim-heroine, is constantly resentful—her mother, her friends, her children, her husband have all disappointed her. Husband Ned has moved out of the house, toddler Josh may have developmental problems, and daughter Kate is in a boarding facility for troubled teenagers, where she’s just picked a fight with another girl. Despondent, Rachel looks back over her life with Ned. They fell in love in New York, where she was a grad student and he an aspiring artist. When she became unexpectedly pregnant, they married and moved back to Massachusetts, into a house his parents helped him buy; he took a job as a teacher and they doted on their daughter until the summer 13-year-old Kate returned from camp no longer their sunny, athletic, loving daughter, but a sullen tattooed and pierced adolescent (camps allow tattooing and piercing these days?). The incidents Rachel recalls—rudeness, shoplifting—could describe any teenager, but Rachel sensed that Kate’s problems were deeper, even though Kate seemed to rally after she learned Rachel was pregnant. But after unexpected complications kept Kate out of the birthing room, she began a downward emotional spiral that was exacerbated when she accidentally dropped seven-month-old Josh. Soon, she told her psychiatrist that Ned had sexually molested her. No one believed Kate, who’d also begun cutting herself, but Ned lost his job and took up selling real estate for his decent if insensitive parents. Rachel describes her own mother as evil and deranged, although her behavior seems no worse than that of most aging, neurotic mothers. Rachel and Ned visit Kate’s school, and after the girl acknowledges she did a terrible thing, the family joins in a group hug.
Static. Gracefully written, but, after the first few chapters, nothing builds until the uplifting (and unearned) close.Pub Date: April 8, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41547-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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
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.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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