An engaging piece of English upstairs-downstairs business as a young woman weaves a tangled web of deception to help her unemployed husband and ailing baby. British writer White (Dogboy, 1996, etc.) likes a bit of satire in her novels, and here she adroitly skewers tycoons, under- class layabouts, and lineage-obsessed gentry as she tells the story of Ange Harper, the orphan who dreamed big. Ange has been brought up in foster homes, but somehow none ever kept her long; she learned about the finer things of life from one of them, but at 16 she was on her own. In love with weak but handsome Billy Harper, who's run away from home and can't seem to hold a job, Ange marries him when she finds she's pregnant. On welfare, the two are placed in a squalid residential hotel, and Ange is determined to find something better for Billy and son Jacob. Soon, the beautiful and intelligent young mother comes up with the perfect scheme: She'll hide her marriage to Billy, will marry and then—at an appropriate time—divorce a wealthy businessman. She settles on the twice- married and currently single Sir Fabian Ormerod. Using her wits and imagination, she fakes her history, steals fashionable clothes, and passes herself off as an upper-class career woman, eventually becoming the new Lady Ormerod. But the best-laid plans inevitably go wrong. Fabian's daughter by his first marriage, fearing the loss of her inheritance when Ange bears a son, plots with a charismatic satanist to get rid of her; Ange is sent disturbing, anonymous letters that vividly detail her childhood and current life; and Jacob is kidnapped. All manner of truths are eventually revealed, but Sir Fabian, it turns out, can't afford scandal, and asks Ange to continue to appear in public as his wife and the mother of his heir. A contemporary cautionary tale with bite and flair.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-75280-045-0
Page Count: 295
Publisher: Orion/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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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