An uplifting tale about a woman who voices her desires and transcends her limitations, shedding a revealing and flattering...
In this novel, a young woman with cerebral palsy lives, loves, and thrives.
Confined to a wheelchair and unable to speak without assistance from an electronic device, Lily Cooper accepts being dependent on others for help. Her only friend—her beloved sister, Layna—treats her like an equal, while her well-intentioned parents fight about her care. When Layna dies unexpectedly, Lily sinks into depression (“I have no idea of the purpose of my existence anymore. I question what it is in this world that is still keeping me alive”). But eventually she realizes that she must reimagine her future. What follows is an inspiring glimpse into the active and determined mind of a person who, from the outside, appears to be unresponsive. Lily remains, in fact, painfully aware of other people, from those who speak loudly and slowly as if she can’t understand them to those who call her “retarded” just to hurt her feelings. But the ones who take the time to learn how to communicate with her become charmed by her determination and grace. Lily never lets her disability stop her from pursuing her dreams. She finishes high school, attends college, gets her own apartment, and starts a family. Although there are a couple of structural hiccups (the time shifts in the first act seem unnecessary and cause Lily to introduce herself twice to the reader), Williby (Loving You Hurts So Good, 2016, etc.) successfully balances Lily’s many triumphs with detailed descriptions of the day-to-day hardships of living with cerebral palsy. Lily requires help performing the most basic tasks, and her limited mobility sometimes leaves her stranded in awkward—and potentially dangerous—situations. In one thought-provoking scene, Lily’s parents deliberately seize her communication device to keep her from asking too many questions about a painful subject. But Lily is willing to fight for her independence, especially when she meets Chance Ryker, who watched his father die from ALS and fears meeting the same fate. In one especially lovely scene, he tells Lily, “I love to see you smile because you smile with your eyes.”
An uplifting tale about a woman who voices her desires and transcends her limitations, shedding a revealing and flattering light on the private lives of the disabled.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5152-2474-7
Page Count: 206
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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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