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THROUGH A DREAM

Name: THROUGH A DREAM
Author: David J. Howard
ISBN: 978-1-5255-2808-8

by David J. Howard ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 9, 2018

A heartfelt but uneven tale about age and loss.

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In this inspirational debut novel, a man dreams that his dead mother comes back to spend a day with the family.

Family is incredibly important to Greg Peters. When he gets a call from his stepmother saying his father has had a heart attack, his world is thrown off its axis. Greg rushes to the hospital and waits for news, recalling all the memories he has of his father, mother, brothers, and grandparents and how these people shaped the man he has become. He learns his father will have to undergo a triple bypass. “With his years of smoking and his COPD,” a doctor tells Greg and the rest of the family, “there are a lot of risks and challenges ahead. It’s by no means going to be an easy procedure.” Though his father survives the surgery, complications force him to stay in the hospital for months. Greg continues to see him and to reflect on their time together. One day, while sleeping in his father’s hospital room, Greg has a dream in which he returns to the family cottage and sees his mother, who has been dead for 14 years. He asks: “How is it that I’m standing here looking and talking to my mom?” She replies: “I have no idea either, Greg. But here I am, and you have me for the day.” With the members of his family back together for one day, can Greg say all the things he wants to tell them? Howard’s prose is simple and sentimental, and he creates a warm sense of nostalgia with the numerous flashbacks to Greg’s youth. At one point, the protagonist recalls a valuable pep talk from his father: “Ever since you were fourteen years old, I watched you at trade shows, interacting with people, and I could tell back then that you have what it takes…I could see the drive and determination you had at everything you did. There’s no doubt you are one special kid.” But the flashbacks are sometimes too boilerplate to captivate, and they do little to invigorate the plodding frame of the narrative. By the time the dream begins (and the audience will be well aware that it is a dream), readers will likely have lost any investment they had in the novel’s outcome.

A heartfelt but uneven tale about age and loss.

Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5255-2808-8

Page Count: 240

Publisher: FriesenPress

Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2018

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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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

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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.