A hell of a read, but not much of a book.
Neff (Blackgammon, 2000) serves up an Afro-Caribbean-Gothic stew spiced with purple prose and an intricate plot.
Dark secrets swirl around Wisdom, the crumbling old plantation on St. Croix to which young nurse Maia Ransom has come from Michigan, drawn by her grandfather’s tales of the grand house where he spent his early years. But the lush scenery, studly men, and sparkling sea can’t distract Maia, dying of ovarian cancer and inspired by a soul-deep sense of kinship with her unknown St. Croix forebears. Though Wisdom can’t be found on any contemporary map, and the islanders clam up whenever she inquires, a handsome Puerto Rican guide eventually leads her to the ramshackle, vine-covered structure that remains. Here lives the last descendant of the Danish planters who built it, dissolute Severin Johanssen and his tiger-eyed, fiercely jealous consort Tina, who scares Maia off the property. Our heroine returns in secret to meet Severin, who has been happily lusting after black women ever since his misspent youth. He’s dying of liver cancer, so Maia concocts a mysterious healing broth and feeds it to him when not dallying with handsome young lawyer Noah Langston. Noah has been searching old archives in St. Croix and finds the Ransom connection at last: the Ransoms were renowned African healers before they were slaves, and the son of the first Johanssen fell in love with a Ransom girl. The couple was married by an English clergyman before he was forced to abandon her and wed the rich daughter of another Danish planter. Yes, Maia is descended directly from this union and may well have a claim to the old estate. But, first, an epic struggle ensues between all parties concerned, encompassing a dark and stormy night, a ruined mill tower, a seventh son, and . . . could that be the deed to the plantation hidden behind that sliding stone?
A hell of a read, but not much of a book.Pub Date: June 25, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-44743-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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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