Charming, deftly amusing pastiche purporting to be the dictated memoirs of a 108-year-old scallywag who boxed, swindled, and seduced numerous historical personalities in his long life—and may even have started WW I, all while chasing the girl of his dreams. Departing from his customary gung-ho thrillers, Thayer (White Star, 1995, etc.) delivers a hilarious historical farce told through the eyes of Woodrow Lowe, a working-class Boston Irishman who, in 1879 at age 15, is smitten with the upper-class charms of Amy Balfour, daughter of the founder of the Massachusetts State Bank, when he stops the hard-drinking boxer John L. Sullivan from coldcocking her carriage horse. Amy and her snobbish brother Richard repulse Lowe's bumbling, shanty-town advances, with the grasping, mercenary Amy rudely ridiculing him. After abandoning his day job in his father's saloon, Lowe supports his nascent prizefighter's career by dusting the floor of Harvard's gym. There, on a bet, he knocks out future Rough Rider Theodore Roosevelt, who later befriends him, enlists him as a spy, and sends him out on a series of increasingly hairsbreadth (and ribald) adventures. Throughout his travels, Lowe survives by pluck and happy accidents, and even, eventually, finds true lust—in the arms of Tzu Hsi, the Empress Dowager of China. Along the way, he not only blunders up San Juan Hill with the Rough Riders but cuts a deal with Diamond Jim Brady that will enable him to avenge himself on the ever- disdainful, cruel Amy and her slimy brother. Ultimately, he gets his face carved into the whiskers of Roosevelt's moustache on Mount Rushmore. Writing in the tradition of Thomas Berger's Little Big Man, Thayer revels in the burlesque he adds to our otherwise overly romanticized past, gleefully transforming numerous well-known sacred cows—such as haughty Civil War General Philip Sheridan— into braying jackasses. In all, a breezy, impeccably researched picaresque: the best book of Thayer's career.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55611-512-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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