Jane Austen—nay, Helen Fielding—she isn’t.
Bestselling Brit serves up a frothy Bridget Jones–like account of a fashion-savvy newlywed faced with a monster-in-law whose bark is worse than her bite.
Ellie Black is a perfectly fulfilled, self-sufficient, single woman, thank you very much. Head of marketing at a chain of hip, Ian Schrager–esque UK hotels, she shops the designer racks of London’s Soho, albeit only on sale days. But when blissfully bland TV producer Dan Cooper pops the question, things progress breezily from engagement to wedding to unplanned pregnancy to birth of bouncing baby. Predictably, the other woman of the title turns out to be Dan’s mum, Linda (perfunctory Oedipal undertones alluded to if not included). Despite the endless wrongs Linda commits (paying for the wedding! presents galore for her newborn grandson! heirloom diamond earrings!), none seems to warrant our narrator’s consuming hatred—that is, until a baby-dropping incident in France that’s so abhorrent as to make the eventual reconciliation between mother and daughter-in-law seem even less justifiable. Then again, Green lets inconsistencies abound. The pop-psych explanation for Ellie’s fear of abandonment (one never actually exhibited, since marital separation yields the requisite tear down the cheek, new outfits, and a date with a hunky bachelor) is that her own alcoholic mother was killed while drunk-driving when Ellie was 13. She becomes an avowed teenage teetotaler: “I discovered boys, and dope, and parties. Not drink, though . . . .” Why then the recurrent hankerings for a cocktail (“I could do with some dancing, and . . . I could certainly do with some drinking”; “Oh, why did I have so many vodkas last night?”)? And when it comes to female friendships, Ellie switches allegiances faster than Renee Zellweger morphs from a size 2 to a 12. The reader is merely apathetic witness to it all.
Jane Austen—nay, Helen Fielding—she isn’t.Pub Date: March 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-718-14635-2
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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