Peter Blake is an architect who cares about the environment, and as a vegetarian who emphasizes sustainability in his...
Ashley’s debut novel tells the story of an idealist’s journey from criminal suspect to accepted messiah.
Peter Blake is an architect who cares about the environment, and as a vegetarian who emphasizes sustainability in his designs, he practices and preaches his beliefs. For his latest project, for example, he gives “instructive lectures to the workers about…the sustainable features he incorporated in the building.” One day, Peter finds himself mistakenly entangled in a double homicide on the construction site, and he becomes a wanted man. Forced to flee to a cabin in North Carolina, he hides while his trusted and lovely lawyer, Sofie, attempts to sort things out. Fortunately for Peter, his cabin is designed with the same environmental fastidiousness as his bigger projects: “Why pay for heat when the sun supplies far more than he ever needed, even in winter?” he reflects. Meanwhile, a fierce gentleman named Boris is attempting to track Peter down; he’s as skilled at investigation as Peter is at architecture, and he seems sure to get his man. Then the unexpected happens: After Peter leaves his woodsy hideaway, he emerges in a nearby church, where the churchgoers believe him to be the second coming of Christ. Seeing a rare opportunity for redemption, as well as a platform to preach his own sort of gospel, Peter becomes “The Man They Call Jesus.” He offers his seven principles to the world (the Fifth Principle, for example, is “Democracy, not Tyranny”). Peter must figure out how to survive in environments that are either accepting or hostile toward his message. The novel is slowed down at times by unenlightening details, such as when Sofie notes that a building’s “design uses as many plants as possible because plants absorb carbon dioxide and also give off life-supporting oxygen.” That said, the story does manage moments of great excitement: Will Peter really manage to convince people his message is worthwhile, and also avoid the aggressive Boris? Although some of Peter’s seven principles may strike some readers as obvious (“Almost no country on earth has all the natural resources it needs”), those intrigued by a TED-talking messiah will be eager to find out his fate.Pub Date: July 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496102621
Page Count: 548
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 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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