Agreeable, predictable and forgettable.
Half-sisters reconnect with each other, and with Mr. Rights from their pasts, during the summer of 2008.
Their Aunt Lydia, sister to the father who left Peck’s mother for Cassie’s, has bequeathed her rickety shack in Southampton to the two young women. “The situation,” Peck declares with her usual drama, “is that you and I can’t agree on anything.” Cassie wants to sell Fool’s House and head back to Switzerland, where she works desultorily as a journalist. Peck, a would-be actress living in New York, wants to hang onto the house as an accoutrement to the ultra-fabulous lifestyle she aspires to. She also wants to accept an invitation from Miles Noble, who broke her heart seven years ago, the summer she obsessively read and reread The Great Gatsby and pressed it on 21-year-old Cassie, who’d never read it. Surely it means something that the now fabulously wealthy Miles is throwing “a GATSBY party” and has invited them? Cassie, more sober than her flamboyant semi-sibling, doubts it but agrees to go in hopes of finding architect Finn Killian, who might know the combination to Aunt Lydia’s locked safe. The guy she remembers as a distant older man turns out to be a sexy charmer, though Cassie is convinced against all evidence that he’s “just being polite” as he pursues her throughout the summer. Peck, meanwhile, is dismayed by the vulgarity of Miles’ ostentatious mansion, but comes to appreciate his sterling qualities as the season winds down with hints of the economic meltdown to come. There’s absolutely no suspense about narrator Cassie ending up with perfect Finn, though she’s amazingly obtuse about his interest, and Peck is made up of attitudes and tics rather than actual personality traits. Still, Ganek (Lula Meets God and Doubts Him, 2007) provides enough zippy one-liners, moderately vivid party scenes and adequately attractive descriptions of clothes to sustain a paper-thin plot involving a missing painting and an unwanted houseguest.
Agreeable, predictable and forgettable.Pub Date: May 31, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02178-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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