A moving, character-driven tale of the limits of bitterness and regret.
In Zerndt’s (The Roadrunner Cafe, 2016, etc.) literary novel, three lost souls cling together in an angry Wisconsin town.
Orphaned Shawna Reynolds, who is Ojibwa, is a few years out of high school and desperate to get out of her hometown of Mercer, Wisconsin. She resents most white people, who’ve exhibited no shortage of racism. “The poor kid didn’t stand a chance,” thinks Shawna as she watches a young white boy fish with his father. “Whether he wanted to be or not, he was a racist-in-training. Half the kid’s heart was probably already polluted, and by the time he reached high school, his insides would be entirely black.” She gets on OK with her next-door neighbor Kay O’Brien, at least. Kay is mourning her recently deceased husband and worrying about her Alzheimer’s diagnosis. She mostly worries about what will happen to her son, who doesn’t yet know about the disease. That son, Douglas O’Brien, is doing his best to keep the family auto repair shop from going under, feeling responsible for the death of his father, hanging out with Shawna, and making drawings that nobody ever sees in his sketchbook. The three form a moody family unit of sorts, attempting to protect one another from the rest of the world, but when a local dispute over fishing rights turns into a larger conflict about race, the wounds that each of them has been nursing threaten to rupture. Zerndt’s prose is smooth and matter-of-fact: “As they waited at a stoplight in town, Shawna found herself staring at a fire hydrant. It resembled a little girl in a red coat, and, for some reason, this little girl looked to Shawna like she was about to jump off the sidewalk into traffic.” Kay and Douglas are compelling characters, but Shawna steals the show with her frank declarations and hard-bitten worldview. Engaging from the first chapter, the trio propels the reader through a meandering plot that neither shies away from timely issues nor drifts too far into despair. By the end of it, the reader is left with that wonderful sense of having truly been somewhere else for a little while.
A moving, character-driven tale of the limits of bitterness and regret.Pub Date: June 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-07-284247-7
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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