An engaging, if sometimes-blunt, novel about race relations, arrogance, and local politics.
An ambitious lawyer returns to his hometown to overthrow the local administration in Radford’s debut legal novel.
Attorney Daniel Riley is back in rural Goshen County, Georgia, after several years away, in the hope of becoming county commissioner. To do so, he’ll have to take down the long-serving incumbent, Leon Darby, who owns the massive tobacco company at the center of the county’s Woeconomy. It’s a position that gives Darby immense power—and inspires immense resentment among the local farmers. Daniel’s old high school debate teammate, the altruistic and newly wealthy lawyer Michael Drummond, thinks that Darby is vulnerable as a candidate. Daniel has always dreamed of holding office, but he’s tried and failed before, and his wife, Amber, is opposed to the idea of his trying again. Daniel soon finds that he may be more out of step with the conservative locals than he’d anticipated. Michael, who’s African-American, is ambivalent about the white Daniel’s return; he’s put in more work in the county than Daniel has, but the racism of the local electorate would make it difficult for him to successfully run. As the two men set to work, they not only confront an amoral, entrenched opponent with unanticipated resources—they also must deal with their own clashing personalities, which drove them apart years ago. Radford’s prose is light and descriptive, particularly when evoking the landscape of Goshen County, which features “miles and miles of farmland, seemingly never-ending fields of tall, ripening tobacco stalks, weeks from harvest, punctuated occasionally by a driveway or fence line. The stalks obscured the horizon in all directions, a rich green palette on either side of the grey line of road.” That said, the novel lacks subtlety in both its characterizations and its politics, although it does talk straightforwardly about race and how it affects every aspect of Goshen County life. It makes some points in heavy-handed ways, and some aspects of the plot drift into melodrama. Despite this, the story remains compelling, and the pages fly by.
An engaging, if sometimes-blunt, novel about race relations, arrogance, and local politics.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5439-7792-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Biscuette Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2019
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
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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