A breezy, lighthearted island story.
Cutler’s (West of Wisdom, 2006, etc.) latest thriller centers on a young man who finds greed, danger and love in a Caribbean paradise.
Recent college graduate Stacy Biddle decides to play hooky from the professional life his parents imagined for him. He takes a job at Island Life Charters on the beautiful, twin-peaked isle of St. Lucia in the Lesser Antilles. He’s no sooner begun when the Romarin, the sailboat belonging to company owner Franklin Ruddings, comes cruising into Rodney Bay without Franklin. Onboard is his frantic young wife, Amanda, who gives readers their first—and last—impression of Franklin: While shooting at dolphins in hope that their blood would attract sharks and cause a feeding frenzy, Franklin became so excited that he accidentally fell overboard, victim to the very sharks he attracted (“They grabbed his arms and legs and wagged their heads”). Franklin’s death causes the corporate sharks at Island Life to gather, especially his evil cousin, Richard Wronkle, who attempts to gain control of the company and sell it to the highest bidder. Stacy, caught up in these machinations, impulsively takes the Romarin out to sea, unknowingly transporting stowaway Amanda. The two face off against the Venezuelan police and a vividly described hurricane. Cutler’s Caribbean paradise is drawn with vibrancy and color, but some of the book’s dialogue sounds unnatural: During the hurricane, Stacy blurts out, “I didn’t know the sea was so heartless, could be so cruel. I didn’t know! I didn’t know!” As a main character, Stacy is something of a cipher, while descriptions of Wronkle’s villainous machinations are where this brisk narrative comes to life. A headlong plot and stray elements of whimsy combine to make the soap opera–esque events seem funnier than the author might have intended. Nevertheless, readers will likely be too entranced by the environment to complain.
A breezy, lighthearted island story.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-1466468566
Page Count: 344
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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