Precisely drawn but an age-old portrait of a dreamy girl on the sudden verge of womanhood.
An overly familiar outing from Evans (Carter Clay, 1999; The Blue Hour, 1994) tells of one Frances Jean Wahl, 13 years old—and beset by sexual longing.
Not that anyone in Pynch Lake, Iowa, notices. Her hard-drinking father, Brick, and her careworn mother, Peg, are too preoccupied with Franny’s older sisters, Rosamund and Martie, back from college for the summer of 1965. So Franny drifts aimlessly on the periphery of all these other lives, trying to make sense of them and of her own, pondering the differences between “good girls,” “nice girls,” and just plain “bad girls,” these last represented by her much more worldly sisters, whose pale lipstick and backcombed hair give a hint of the cultural turmoil to come. Daydreaming Franny half-listens to the voices in her head: her mother’s prim nagging, her sisters’ sexual innuendoes, and—incongruously—remembered snippets of Emily Dickinson. Of course, a sensitive girl like Franny loves poetry and writes it, too (fortunately, these ingenuous efforts are not quoted very often). Meanwhile, a crowd of characters, mostly teenagers, while away the endless summer with minor fights, furious necking in convertibles, and miniature golf. Despite her sisters’ escapades with various worthless boyfriends, it’s Franny who commits the revolutionary act of actually falling in love—and with an older boy, at that. After her sexual curiosity is satisfied as well, she’s set upon by a gang of thugs on a lonely road, viciously and inexplicably beaten to within an inch of her life, though indeed the resilient Franny recovers. Evans’s skillfully clear prose is suited well to capturing the nuances of this very small world, but the subject matter is antediluvian, and, if anything, the author has evoked the suffocating tedium of summer in Iowa only too well.
Precisely drawn but an age-old portrait of a dreamy girl on the sudden verge of womanhood.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-019550-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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
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
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