A disappointing second effort from Barr (Backpack, Jan. 2002), not helped a bit by the snotty tone.
You can run, but you can’t hide.
Lina Pritchett reasons that no one will ever find her in Craggy Rock, one of the most remote hamlets in Australia. She’s dyed her hair and settled down with a good man named Tony, who has no way of knowing that she’s actually Daisy Fraser, vilified in the British tabloids a decade ago as a murderer, purveyor of a lethal overdose to Giles de Montfort (“one of those Hugh Grant-type boys”). Her ten-year-old son Red—she always said she adopted him from wandering hippies in India—and Tony, an opal miner and man of few words, would rather watch TV than argue with her. She’s pregnant again, so she’s got a roight to act a little crazy, roight? Life goes on, and Lina figures she’s probably safe forever. But then Sophie, best friend from way back, comes to the outback for a family wedding and recognizes Lina/Daisy. Worse: Sophie is dating a sleazy tabloid reporter who desperately needs a big story to jump-start his sagging career. Lawrence Golchin springs forth from his London lair, hot on the trail of this old, cold case, and pounces on Daisy, harassing her and her family mercilessly. Turns out that Daisy ran around with the wrong crowd when she was a troubled young ballerina at the Royal Academy. Giles never should have injected the speed she gave him, and she really isn’t responsible for what happened. But she must set things right with Mum and Dad back in dismal old England, plus have a heart-to-heart with Sophie, who was utterly shattered when she thought Daisy had thrown herself off a bridge after the scandal broke. Will the Aussies extradite Lina on murder charges even though she’s preggers? Did she really adopt Red from wandering hippies, or is he Giles’s son? Will she have to go back to her real hair color?
A disappointing second effort from Barr (Backpack, Jan. 2002), not helped a bit by the snotty tone.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-452-28382-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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