An often engaging mix of soap-operatic melodrama and rom-com gratification.
Four women discover that their conflicts can bring them closer together in this novel about family, love, and self-esteem.
The Aaldenbergs are strict believers in tradition. Their lives revolve around the family hardware store—a centerpiece of their small hometown, where livelihoods are driven by tourist seasons, loans, and the generosity of neighbors. The family is thrown into disarray, however, when their patriarch dies from cancer. Gwen, the eldest sister at 22, is desperate to leave for Boston, but feels held back by an obligation to bring the family out of financial straits. Betta, 20, dreams of owning the store and leaving her own mark on the town but feels overshadowed by Gwen. Teenage Esmerelda gets involved in high school vendettas and steals things from the family store as she tries to find herself. And Wanda, the matriarch, falls into a deep depression after discovering that her spending habits have put the family in debt. Meanwhile, separate infidelity scandals involving Gwen and Betta threaten to tear the family apart. With the riveting intrigue and melodrama of a soap opera, Mercer (Dark & Stormy, 2017) infuses rich psychoanalytical insight into each gesture and conversation: “Esmerelda loved how his smiles worked in fractions. She liked measuring them, what made them pass a quarter to a half, and what kind of seriously fabulous business pushed him to three-fourths.” But Mercer’s tendency to explicitly and repeatedly state each character’s central flaws and insecurities renders them predictable. This is especially the case with the underdeveloped love interests and antagonists, as relationships seem unable to survive on unconditional love and acceptance. Despite these histrionics (and occasional typos), Mercer’s prose is lucid and her themes of redemption and reinvention are resonant: “ ‘People come and people go.’ And after they go…all you’re left with is you,” thinks Betta at one point. Overall, this novel is more than just a wild drama about romance and family; it’s about learning how to deal with loss, choose what matters most, and be happy with who you are.
An often engaging mix of soap-operatic melodrama and rom-com gratification.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73213-321-1
Page Count: 339
Publisher: Bare Ink
Review Posted Online: May 18, 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
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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