An unevenly written anti-war, gender-fluid, and environmentally conscious tale.
In this novel, Anderson-Minshall (co-author: Queerly Beloved, 2014, etc.) tells the stories of a transgender man, the son he adopts, and the daughter he gave up.
Flint Douglas, an intersex teenager, counts himself blessed to have found Coyote “Ki” Douglas, who adopts him after he experiences years of abuse from foster parents. Ki’s compassionate act gets Flint off the streets and into a protective environment, where he’s allowed to grow into his body and emotions. This comfortable hideaway begins to crumble, however, when Ki is informed that his biological daughter, Brooke, has become ill while serving in Iraq and needs a kidney transplant. While reconnecting with his daughter and traveling with his adopted son, Ki’s past is revealed. Flint learns about his father’s origins, the abuse he suffered as a child, and the salvation he eventually found from “a well-dressed middle-aged gay man.” The more Ki tells Flint about his life, the more the teen relates to him. In the end, Ki passes on his wisdom and knowledge to the young man, who believes the key to keeping Ki’s lessons alive is sharing a fable of the Salmon People, which Ki used to tell to schoolchildren. Anderson-Minshall manages to juggle several major political topics, including war, green living, and even video game violence. Some of the plotline involving gender identity brings to mind Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and the Iraq-set war scenes are reminiscent of the Afghanistan-set 2007 book Lone Survivor. There’s a particularly significant anti-war theme; at one point, Flint thinks that American combat soldiers fighting had no guilt about their actions, which “made them far from innocent, and he kind of thought they deserved to get hurt or at least become shell-shocked.” Anderson-Minshall’s descriptions, however, can be overly thorough and misplaced: An early chapter is spent distinguishing Sunni from Shi‘ite Muslims and the treatment of Iraqi Muslims versus Native Americans, with Brooke as an incidental detail in the background, thinking that she’s dying. And despite all the political dialogue in this book, there’s little real conversation for the first 40 pages or so.
An unevenly written anti-war, gender-fluid, and environmentally conscious tale.Pub Date: April 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9982521-7-9
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Transgress Press
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2018
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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