This sequel to Not a Day Goes By (2000) delivers plenty of catty dish with a dash of sentimentality. Fans of Harris, who...
Delicious diva Yancey Harrington Braxton’s grand scheme to make her showbiz comeback is complicated by her newly sprung jailbird mother—and a painful secret from the past.
Her career trajectory cooling off, actress/singer Yancey finds herself in Miami starring in a production of Dreamgirls, a gig that offers her a steady paycheck but nowhere near the adulation to which she feels entitled. Acutely aware that she is not getting any younger and contemplating selling the pricey New York City townhouse she can no longer afford, Yancey sees her luck improving when she meets oh-so-fine S. Marcus Pinkston outside a Miami club. Great in bed and loaded (he drives an Aston Martin, no less), S. Marcus certainly seems to be smitten with his new lady and even offers to boost her back on top by getting Yancey her own reality-show deal. Sweet! But while that is being worked out, and unbeknownst to Yancey, her mother Ava is released early from prison, where she was serving time for killing a man. A nasty piece of work who makes the self-centered Yancey seem like a kindergarten teacher, Ava claims she is eager to reconnect with her only child, but secretly plots revenge, blaming Yancey for ruining her life. She moves into her daughter’s house and enlists dimwitted fellow ex-con Lyrical and her drug-dealing thug boyfriend Donnie Ray to help with her plan. Meanwhile, Yancey learns that the daughter she gave up while in college has grown into teen singing sensation Madison B, a sweet girl raised well by Yancey’s ex. That Madison happens to be worth millions is not lost on Yancey, who tries to respect the girl’s privacy, while facing her many regrets. Madison aches for a mother’s love, but could she ever trust the woman who sat out the first 16 years of her life? Ava works her own angles, showing Yancey everything that a mother should not be.
This sequel to Not a Day Goes By (2000) delivers plenty of catty dish with a dash of sentimentality. Fans of Harris, who died in July, will lap it up.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5890-6
Page Count: 438
Publisher: Karen Hunter Publishing/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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