Well-characterized, entertaining tale with a resilient heroine whose golden years take an unexpected turn.
In Conley’s (Bread and Stones, 1986, etc.) novel, a New York businesswoman confronts embezzlement by her own son.
Trading in diverse commercial real estate holdings and amassing a multimillion-dollar portfolio, Letty Lear has invested years of her life protecting and providing for her three children. She’s nearly 70 when her attorney advises that she incorporate and make her children (and him) the board of directors, thus giving them access to her finances. After her husband left her years ago for a man, Letty worked her way up, becoming a formidable matriarch with an acerbic wit, holding her own in a tough real estate market, and usually getting her way with her kids. Astute Letty is a force to be reckoned with—sharp and sharp-tongued, opinionated, funny, and at times charitable, not necessarily with money. Her oldest child, David, is an activist who’s taken in a Burmese refugee, precocious Tong, raising him as his son. Middle child Kate, recently separated, is a clutter therapist, and the youngest, Luna, is the sweet-natured mother of twins. David is increasingly concerned about poverty and violence in Darfur, as is his mentor, Jonathan Greene, who hopes to provide aid to alleviate a deteriorating situation. Eventually, funds will transfer from the Gates Foundation, but during the delay, people are dying in Darfur. By clandestinely borrowing Letty’s millions, David can provide relief now and postpone dealing with the consequences, which are considerable and not borne entirely by him. The novel shares some elements of Shakespeare’s King Lear, most notably a powerful, aging familial head ceding control of property to heirs, setting all in motion. The result is a touching comedy/drama of family dynamics, finances, business, and legalities. At 12, street-smart Tong is a standout character, more like Letty than her children. A natural leader, he’s disarmingly intelligent, reliable in an emergency, and resistant to David’s efforts to groom him for activism. Although the novel is hardly Shakespearean tragedy, it’s a well-crafted story of rebirth through crisis and finding redemption in unlikely places.
Well-characterized, entertaining tale with a resilient heroine whose golden years take an unexpected turn.Pub Date: March 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-1493651979
Page Count: 224
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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