What could have been an edgy excursion into the individual toll of the Recession on real women devolves into fluff.
Life keeps interrupting a former beauty queen’s planned suicide in Flagg’s latest (Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven, 2006, etc.) take on Southern womanhood.
Maggie Fortenberry, Miss Alabama circa the late 1960s, is not exactly depressed, but at age 60, toiling as a Birmingham Realtor as the housing bubble implodes, she simply finds life too burdensome. So she’s planned a graceful exit, donating her sparse but tasteful wardrobe, paying her bills, leaving the balance of her meager bank account to charity, etc. She’s set her suicide for late October 2008, when Brenda, her best friend and colleague at Red Mountain Realty, convinces her she must see the Whirling Dervishes during their one-night-only November appearance in Birmingham. Maggie reschedules her date with doom, but pretexts for further postponements pop up. Crestview, a mansion originally owned by Scottish industrialist and Birmingham city father Edward Crocker, is coming on the market, and Maggie suspends genteel despair long enough to snatch the listing from Red Mountain’s archrival in realty, Babs Bingington, the Beast of Birmingham. Not only did Babs indirectly cause the death of Red Mountain’s revered founder, the miniscule but irrepressible Hazel, but thanks to Babs’ scorched-earth sales tactics, Birmingham’s historic homes are being razed and replaced by shoddily constructed, vulgar monstrosities. Once Crestview is safely sold, an auto accident and grateful goat farmers present further impediments to self-destruction. Not to mention the skeleton, dressed in full Scots regalia, discovered in Crestview’s attic. Or Brenda’s compulsive overeating, which lands her in the hospital. The early sections of the novel evoke sympathy for Maggie as she rifles her catalog of regrets: her sabotaged chances at the Miss America crown, failed love affairs, thwarted dreams of success in the Big Apple and general incompetence at everything except beauty—now rapidly fading. Although the plot may justify tarring its villain or deifying its savior too broadly, there is no excuse for the Hazel-ex-machina ending.
What could have been an edgy excursion into the individual toll of the Recession on real women devolves into fluff.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6593-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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