HOW I BECAME A FISHERMAN NAMED PETE

Name: HOW I BECAME A FISHERMAN NAMED PETE
Author: David Spencer
ISBN: 1-880909-65-0

by David Spencer ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2003

Disarmingly simple, despite its hairpin twists and buried secrets: Spencer manages to convey the real wonder of discovering...

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A meticulously crafted coming-of-age tale by recent college graduate Spencer.

Tom Banner, at twentysomething, is so innocent that he almost begs to be taken advantage of. A dock manager at a Baltimore shipping firm, he dutifully swallows any indignity that his cretinous boss Steve sends his way, whether it’s sitting through the same corporate orientation film with each new batch of employees or scouring out the staff kitchen to save the cost of cleaners. How is he rewarded? With dismissal, once Steve discovers that Tom never repaid the $80 he never even knew had accidentally been added to his paycheck. Steve even threatens to charge Tom with theft, and the innocent lad panics and skips town. He hides out in Ocean City, Maryland, with Leah Greene, the niece of a Baltimore friend, and waits for his friend and co-worker Conrad Begg to call when the coast is clear at home. Leah works in a bar and is obviously unhappy and lonely. She seems attracted to Tom, but there’s something so odd and distant about her that Tom tries to discourage her—and her uncle Fritz, who is determined to set the pair up for some reason neither Tom nor Leah can understand. Tom takes odd jobs, then finds something more permanent when Fritz’s friend Joe mistakes Tom for someone named Pete and hires him to work on his fishing boat. Tom isn’t a natural-born fisherman, but he hits it off with Joe, who offers him a salary and place to live if he stays on. Tom’s tempted but wants to get back to his old life in Baltimore. Or does he? By now he and Leah have fallen in love—but Tom still has to learn what Dark Secret she’s keeping from him.

Disarmingly simple, despite its hairpin twists and buried secrets: Spencer manages to convey the real wonder of discovering life for the first time.

Pub Date: March 1, 2003

ISBN: 1-880909-65-0

Page Count: 320

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003

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.