An amusing and thoughtful political tale.
In this novel, a Donald Trump supporter dreams of building the restaurant of the future while others conspire to hold him accountable for the low wages he pays his workers.
George Dealy and his wife, Suzanne, have always had their differences politically. Republican George came from a working-class background and now owns several McDonald’s franchises. Suzanne, whose heritage includes wealthy parents, currently co-chairs the Democratic Committee in their town of Canaandale, New York. On a fateful night in the summer of 2016, George antagonizes his wife by insulting the French economist Thomas Piketty in front of her cultured European friends Hugo and Francesca. Later that evening, when Suzanne mentions a local news story about an impoverished woman who shoplifted, George suggests that if she empathizes so much with the plight of the poor, she should try it herself. Enraged, Suzanne sets out to do just that, hoping to humiliate her husband. Her plans change when she runs into Steve Harris, an underemployed marketer recently separated from his wife. The two bond over a mutual affection for Piketty. Harris sees their meeting as kismet while Suzanne senses another opportunity for revenge on her husband. Meanwhile, Harris’ daughter Cindy is hoping her dad and mother can reconcile and that her boyfriend, a Fight for $15 organizer, would be more supportive. The economic arguments the characters have should be familiar to readers. But their entertaining antics and Hallberg’s (Boon Juster or The Reason for Everything, 2014) snappy prose make for a very engaging read. The only problem with this absorbing story is the foreword, in which the author defines his book as a “social novel,” comparing it to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Jungle, and The Grapes of Wrath. This seems like a misclassification; instead of depicting the struggles of the working class, the tale skillfully shows readers how middle- and upper-class people talk about the rights of workers. (At one point, Hugo tells George: “There is a role for government in helping prevent the worst excesses of an economic system that is fundamentally based on maximizing personal gain. The minimum wage…is only there to protect the poorest and most vulnerable members of society.”) While perhaps bordering on a social novel, Hallberg’s book is delightfully more satirical in tone. It is a relatable and humorous caper and a cogent breakdown and sendup of modern political discourse.
An amusing and thoughtful political tale.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9913770-4-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: The Reason for Everything, LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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