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
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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