Lipman's second novel may not have all the bite of her first (Then She Found Me, 1990), but, still, it serves up a ripe slice of love and life, late-80's style, complete with relevant issues: town vs. gown, truth vs. deception, and (the biggie) man vs. woman. At age 30, still single, Melinda LeBlanc has heard all the standard letdown lines. She even sees them coming. ``Ian sighed a long, sensitive-male's sigh, the universal preamble to the speech about how he wasn't ready/interested/looking/worthy or any other lame excuse for not calling this a date.'' But forewarned is not necessarily forearmed, and Melinda takes more than a few hits in the war zone of relationships. Recently returned to her hometown of Harrow, Massachusetts, a newly gentrified college town, she works as a floral designer and spends a fair amount of time arranging elaborate wedding bouquets for her former high-school classmates. She also attempts to arrange a little matchmaking for two old friends—Libby Getchel, an artsy seamstress, and Dennis Vaughan, a handsome black man who has earned renown as the owner of Brookhoppers, a fancy fly-fishing boutique. Things go amiss, however, in both the matchmaking and floral-arranging departments. But after a certain amount of casual coupling (it's surprising that a book so brimming with up-to-date issues never tackles the problem of safe sex), Melinda finally sorts out which ones to throw back and which one to keep. When she reels him in, it's no big surprise to anybody—except to wry, wise Melinda herself. Compelling, darkly funny, defiantly romantic: a modern-day tale of manners.
Pub Date: March 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-74840-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1991
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
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.
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 1984
ISBN: 0060932686
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1984
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