Conjuring shades of Steinbeck’s meditations on nature, this enjoyable, pleasant yarn passes like the cool summer breezes...
In this short but sweet novella, Wynn spins an enjoyable tale of lost souls colliding in the most unlikely of places.
Jaime is a lonely yet wealthy man living a leisurely, slightly boring, life in an inherited house by the sea in a small, remote Spanish village. While walking near his home, he sees a strange sight: a man parachuting from an airplane and landing a few yards in front of him, just before his plane crashes into the sea. Eventually, Jaime learns that the man, Stefan, is a wanderer like himself, only one who comes from a very different background. Through a strange series of circumstances, the two men find themselves doing what neither thought they would end up doing: trying to sell a large quantity of narcotics in a very short amount of time. Along the way, Stefan discovers that perhaps Jaime’s subdued, quiet way of living is just what he’s needed all along, and Jaime hesitantly longs for a taste of the adventures that Stefan has been struggling through all his days. Sometimes, as the novel shows, what we want isn’t necessarily what’s best for us. Though his writing is at times clunky, Wynn understands the value of honestly drawn and organic characters in moving along a plot that doesn’t quite end with a bang. In fact, the novella’s greatest weakness is its ending. Though the abruptness of the final pages fits the tone of the story, it’s a frustrating ending to a narrative that was just beginning to heat up. Stefan’s love interest comes out of nowhere and has the qualities of a deus ex machina. Still, there are real moments of beauty and wonder as well as passages that speak of Wynn’s ability to understand the inherent frailty of the human condition: “He felt like he was gradually being erased. As if his lack of meaningful human contact and lack of function was causing him to disappear, parts of him already transparent, holes that other people could see through. He was afraid that one day he’d look in a mirror and wouldn’t see anyone.”
Conjuring shades of Steinbeck’s meditations on nature, this enjoyable, pleasant yarn passes like the cool summer breezes described within its pages.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2014
ISBN: 978-0988877993
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Bacon Press Books
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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