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ROXANNE

Name: ROXANNE
Author: E. N. Stewart
ISBN: 978-1477223284

WHO LED HER LOVERS TO THE GATES OF PARADISE AND HER PEOPLE TO THE SUNNY UPLANDS

by E. N. Stewart ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 24, 2012

An afternoon’s delight for devotees of the kinky, but others might hope for more to wrap their minds around.

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This erotic novel traces a woman’s ascendancy to the leadership of a Balkan country, a feat accomplished and accompanied by frequent sexual escapades.

First-time author Stewart relates the lubricious, sometimes scatological tale of Roxanne, a woman whose father, the deposed king of an Eastern European country, has ended up in England after her mother died in unspecified “upheavals” in their former homeland. Undeterred, Roxanne makes her way back as an adult, gradually gaining power, often by getting it on with various men and women in and out of her office. “I’ve done a lot of strategic fucking to get here,” she says, though it’s not all work and no play; she clearly enjoys sex. As she notes after knocking off the president, who dies of a heart attack in bed with her, “Fucking presidents to death must agree with me.” Highlighted by nonstop sex, her subsequent tenure in the executive suite makes Bill Clinton look like a prude. The author gives graphic, blow-by-blow descriptions that border on the clinical of encounters between men and women, women and women, and wilder X-rated happenings. Indeed, though a novel, this book could serve as a useful primer for budding cunnilinguists and as an addendum to the Kama Sutra. Unfortunately, without much interest beyond the bedroom, the plot is too thin to hold the novel together. Though Stewart occasionally tries to sandwich some political philosophy in between the sex sessions, the thoughts on monarchy and democracy are far from profound and are sometimes incomprehensible. Usually competent, the writing stumbles at times, as when a character is “as proud as punch” to have brought a lover to orgasm. For the most part, characters display few attributes besides lascivious ones, so they tend to come off more as mechanical meat puppets than flesh-and-blood humans. Eventually, after so much sex, the novel’s strong suit—its frank approach to and presentation of sex—turns into a weakness: Reading sex scene after sex scene becomes too routine to draw much excitement.

An afternoon’s delight for devotees of the kinky, but others might hope for more to wrap their minds around.

Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2012

ISBN: 978-1477223284

Page Count: 148

Publisher: AuthorHouseUK

Review Posted Online: March 18, 2014

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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DEAD MAN'S WALK

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1995

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A bloated, pointless-seeming prequel to 1985's bestselling Lonesome Dove. In his fourth book in three years, McMurtry (most recently, The Late Child, p. 417) introduces us to future heroes Woodrow Call and Gus McCrae—here, green Texas Rangers who've rashly signed on before age 20, seeking adventure in the wilds of western Texas. On their first mission, an ill-fated attempt to find a safe passage from San Antonio to El Paso, the two come face-to-face with Buffalo Hump, the fierce Comanche chief who almost single-handedly wipes out the whole Ranger troop. Adventure number two is equally doomed—an attempted assault on the far-away Mexican stronghold of Santa Fe. Before they even get to New Mexico, though, Call and Gus must endure the bleak elements, more of Buffalo Hump's abuse, the brutality of the Apaches, and finally the might of the well-trained Mexican Army. While the Rangers are being decimated, the reader is assured of the two heroes' survival. And since the rest of the Rangers are stock B-movie characters—the mournful black cook, the sullen mountain man, the prostitute with a heart of gold—there's little reason to be engaged by them. Overall, the novel's a series of mostly predictable encounters, with no underlying theme or emotional weight, whose best characters—English prisoners stuck in an El Paso leper colony—don't appear until the very end, and then only as an afterthought. In fact, the is seems so slipshoddily produced as to seem unedited, filled with continuity gaps and leaps of fictional faith, not to mention endless scenes, improbable dialogue, and countless leaden sentences: "Gus didn't seem to be particularly concerned about the prospect of Comanche capture—his nonchalant approach to life could be irksome in times of conflict." Only for blindly faithful McMurtry fans.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-684-80753-X

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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IN A NARROW GRAVE
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by Larry McMurtry

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by Larry McMurtry

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COLLECTED STORIES

by Gabriel García Márquez Gabriel Garcia Marquez ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 31, 1984

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Twenty-six tales by the 1982 Nobel Prize Winner, rearranged in roughly chronological order of writing. From the 1968 collection No One Writes to the Colonel come stories of the town of Macondo—about the much-delayed funeral of local sovereign Big Mamma, a dentist's revenge on the corrupt Mayor (extraction sans anesthetic), a priest who sees the Devil, a thief who robs the pool hall of its billiard balls. But the collection's standout—its title novella—is not included here. Likewise, the long title piece from the Leaf Storm collection (1972)—also about a Colonel—is omitted; but it does offer "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" and other beguiling fantasies. And, from 1978's Innocent Erendira And Other Stories comes an uneven mix of mystical fable and diffuse surrealism (some pieces dating, before English translation, from the 1940s or '50s). Much that's brilliant, some that's merely strange and fragmentary, and almost all enhanced by the translations of Gregory Rabassa and S. J. Bernstein.