A sweet, albeit rambling, family story.
A debut novel offers a coming-of-age tale about surviving motherhood, finding independence, and living life on one’s own terms.
Life isn’t working out quite the way that Mia Love planned: “Here I was twenty-six years old with no husband, no money, no plan, a dead-end job, no degree, and a newborn baby.” After falling head over heels with Spence "Spider" Snyder in high school, Mia spent the next 10 years devoted to him, dropping out of college and working as a debt collector to support his budding music career. Now they’re living in a roach-infested tenement with their baby, Tee-Bo, and Mia’s crushed dreams of marriage dangling over their heads. In a fairly believable turn of events, Mia finds a letter from a life insurance company while housesitting for Spider’s mother, Dr. Snyder. It turns out that his mother has been withholding information about the insurance bonanza ($50,000) she collected after the death of Spider’s father. Mia’s discovery throws all their relationships into chaos. Snyder is furious over Mia’s breach of trust, and Mia copes with pressure from a critical mother and loudmouthed sister who both think she should dump Spider if he doesn’t wed her on the spot. Mia grows weary of supporting Spider despite his windfall and suspects that he has been unfaithful, while he is threatened by Mia’s longtime best friend, Romell. That relationship has always been platonic, but Romell’s financial success and Mia’s frustration with Spider threaten to complicate the situation. Meanwhile, Tee-Bo has an inexplicable skin condition that has everyone questioning Mia’s ability to take care of her son. Though it’s set in 1995 New York City—a world of pagers, Walkmans, and computers that require disks—Mia’s story is eminently relatable. She valiantly tries to please everyone around her (at times, her insistence on doing everything herself becomes ridiculous, as when she sets out to spend the dregs of her savings to buy Tee-Bo a crib instead of accepting offers from Romell or her mother to buy it for her). But she ends up realizing that sometimes she does have to put herself first. Though the charming novel is longer than it needs to be and meanders, Watts-Hicks’ prose is highly readable and Mia’s evolution is rewarding.
A sweet, albeit rambling, family story.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-578-03024-1
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Earthatone Enterprises
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2017
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
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
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