Podrug’s strong, crisp style excels at description, particularly in the Russian scenes.
Robbins’s sixth posthumous novel finds new co-writer Podrug outwriting the hormonal old ghost, as was the case with Sin City (2002).
Each of these postmortal works demands a handful of outrageously vulgar scenes to lend a juicy Robbins scent to the whole, and The Betrayers has its pubic pinks. The occupation Podrug digs into here is making vodka, with greed as the usual Robbins subtheme. And as in Podrug’s Presumed Guilty (1997), the hero has a Russian background. Nicholas Cutter is the son of an English communist who marries a Russian communist then finds himself at the mercy of Hitler’s thugs in the early ’30s in Berlin. The parents wind up back in Leningrad, where the father is murdered by Stalin and the mother dies during the siege of Leningrad. Nick, meanwhile, learns about the making of potato vodka. In 1949, he sails to British Honduras and is taken in by his beautiful aunt Sarah and her abusive husband, who run a sugarcane plantation. Nick gets into the black market for Mayan relics and also finds a use for blackstrap molasses: making vodka. Later, he goes to Colombia, takes over the plantation of widow Sarita Garcia, devises a vodka that supposedly boosts sexual prowess, and begins selling it throughout the Caribbean and in Boston. A trip to Havana enfolds him in glamour, and he wants to move his alcohol operation there, now making premium rum. But the Castro takeover forces him to set up his stills in the Dominican Republic, where he falls in love and lives with Luz, the most beautiful woman in the country. Then the dictator Trujillo, impotent from a prostate operation, uses Luz to bring him young girls for his sexual pleasure as a voyeur, watching women make love. But when Trujillo is assassinated, Luz is seen as an assassin.
Podrug’s strong, crisp style excels at description, particularly in the Russian scenes.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-765-30810-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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