Lots of fun elements—ghost story, showtime, romantic married love—but the heroine is slow to grow a spine.
In this debut comic novel, a young couple, both high school theater directors, tries to handle drama from parents, students, and others.
Auditions just began for Oliver!, this year’s spring play at Samuel P. Chester Academy, a wealthy private high school. Kelly and Jackson Graham, six months into their jobs as co-directors, are looking forward to doing a musical after previously putting on Arsenic and Old Lace. Kelly will direct and handle the business end, while Jackson serves as musical director and pianist. Their challenges include helicopter parents, overscheduled kids, a daffy choreographer, a rumored weeping ghost, and Tony, the adult tech director who seems determined to take over managing the show. Kelly feels uneasy about Tony and his overly close relationships with students, but the headmaster disagrees, as do parents, who circulate a petition to have Tony replace the Grahams. Can Kelly find her inner director in time for the show—and her job—to go on? Murdock-Prep’s debut novel offers an enjoyably affectionate showcase of high school drama and its familiar elements, such as theater traditions and acting games, like practicing subtext through different ways of saying “Don’t go.” Characters are varied, their conflicts believable if somewhat broad, usually with a good deal of compassion for young actors. Kelly, however, has some annoying tendencies. She’s emotional, high-strung, and thin-skinned—appropriate enough for a (former) actress, but she seems ill-equipped for directing, which requires confident belief in oneself. Her usual reaction to conflict is avoidance. Even late in the novel, she leaves dealing with an “alpha male” student to her husband, because the boy drains her energy. In the narrative, this is all played for rueful laughs, but the helpless-female routine is rather uninspiring. The book’s tone is also somewhat hammy and overdone, as when Kelly’s ex-professor tells her twice, “It’s not you, it’s them,” which somehow rates the exclamatory comment: “The Prof still knows how to drive a point home!”
Lots of fun elements—ghost story, showtime, romantic married love—but the heroine is slow to grow a spine.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5025-3406-4
Page Count: 350
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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