This is comfort-food fiction, undemanding and full of Moore’s sweet but not saccharine affection for his characters.
The three childhood friends Moore introduced in The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat (2013) are now in their early 60s and facing new challenges.
The three “Supremes” of Plainview, Indiana—a name that emphasizes the unpretentious tone of Moore’s storytelling—are down-home African-American women, except that Clarice is a concert pianist with a penchant for Beethoven, Barbara Jean is Plainview’s wealthiest philanthropist, and Odette—well, Odette talks to the dead. At the unlikely wedding of Clarice’s religious-zealot mother to the owner of a dive called the Pink Slipper Gentlemen’s Club that has only recently become “a respected music venue,” all three friends are moved by elderly blues singer El Walker’s rendition of the “Happy Heartache Blues.” And thus hangs the thread that winds a plot ever so loosely through the novel. El is actually Marcus Henry and the father of Odette’s husband, James. While a heroin addict, El abandoned his wife and small son after accidentally slicing James with a razor blade. El is off drugs, but diabetes lands him in the hospital, where his identity is revealed. As Odette tries to find a way for James and El to come to terms with each other, Clarice prepares for her big breakthrough concert in Chicago. Separated from her philandering husband, Richmond, she's enjoying her independence and their continuing active sex life, but she feels increasingly stifled by Richmond's needy desire for the kind of intimacy he withheld in the past. Recovering alcoholic Barbara Jean is in a happy second marriage and gets less page time than her friends. Subplots meander along concerning both serious issues like a father’s cruelty to his gay, cross-dressing son and sitcom clichés like a pompous, big-hatted would-be preacher lady whose hateful pretensions are exposed by an open microphone. Religion is central to most of these lives although its form ranges from fundamentalist Baptist to Unitarian.
This is comfort-food fiction, undemanding and full of Moore’s sweet but not saccharine affection for his characters.Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-10794-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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