Take the basis for a fine literary cookbook, fold it lightly around a thin romantic plot, heap the whole confection with allusion and history, then glaze it with pretension, and there you'll have Deval's first effort—a hybrid novel-cookbook, termed a ``culinary romance.'' Pomme Bouquin, a self-styled cooking teacher, lives in London but mostly occupies a rarer world made up of great books and good food. She's a girl who smells of cinnamon, smiles a wide smile, and will go to extremes to win the rather hard heart of the man of her dreams, a musician named Jeremy. For Pomme, going to extremes specifically means planning the ultimate meal of seduction. For inspiration, she turns to Colette, Lord Byron, Madame de SÇvignÇ, and other literary lights, re-creating their recipes for us and fully evoking the sensuousness in their writing as well. Alas, it isn't enough for arrogant Jeremy, who dumps her. And in short order Pomme is back at her books, seeking a suitable recipe for revenge. Will it be the Count of Monte Cristo's poisoned lemonade or, perhaps, arsenic-laced jam † la Madame Bovary? Pomme seems deadly serious about her plans for vengeance. But, alas again, there just isn't enough sustenance here to meet the minimum daily requirements of a real novel. Pomme, Jeremy, and the other characters speak in indistinguishable, self-important voices. They're all monomaniacal about good food, but, finally, they are as skimpy and expendable as the paper frills on the lamb chop. The real meat of this book is in the rich anecdotes of the meals dished out in literature, followed by the recipes to achieve them. A feast, then, for food-lovers and cookbook fans, but those hoping for a real story will find it half-baked.
Pub Date: Nov. 8, 1993
ISBN: 0-88001-322-2
Page Count: 197
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
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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