An engaging escapade with a feisty female lead.
A debut historical novel focuses on an adventurous young woman living in Seattle before and after Washington Territory was granted statehood.
It is 1889, and Anna Gallagher is 19 years old. As a child, she was brought to Seattle by her grandfather Oscar after her parents and grandmother died of smallpox in Ireland. Oscar owns a bookshop in town and Anna works for him. Her grandfather wants to find her a suitable husband to secure her a stable future, but the independent Anna has her own agenda. She craves travel and excitement; she is not ready to be tied down by marriage. Her most passionate dream is to be the first woman to scale Mount Rainier: “She’d always wanted to travel around Washington Territory, or take to the sea like her brother Levi, even though it wouldn’t be proper. Every time she looked up at that mountain, it was as if it was daring her to do something great.” When an explosion and fire race through Seattle’s main shopping street, shutting down all businesses, Anna has time to indulge in one of her favorite pastimes: long walks in the woods. There she meets Heather, a member of the Duwamish tribe, who lives off-reservation with her baby and grandmother in a cabin deep in the woods. The developing friendship between these two young women, a relationship that infuriates Anna’s bigoted grandfather, is the connection point for several intriguing plotlines that run through the charming narrative—a treasure hunt for a hidden emerald ring; the protagonist’s training to join a climbing expedition up Mount Rainier; and the issue of Seattle’s reprehensible treatment of Native Americans. Navigating around one or two suitable eligible bachelors, the spirited Anna makes secret plans to achieve her aspirations. McGillen has penned an appealing and gentle tale about relationships; Anna is more Nancy Drew than Wonder Woman. But the mystery of the ring is a satisfying puzzle, and Anna’s struggle to find her place in a society that wants to constrain her within appropriate gender roles is enhanced by the author’s attention to details—of fashion, culture, and even mountain climbing.
An engaging escapade with a feisty female lead.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73342-392-2
Page Count: 358
Publisher: The Evergreen Bookshelf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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