Unlikable heroine, mean-spirited plot.
The author of, most recently, Best Enemies (2003), introduces the “bumbo.”
Melanie Banks is a successful financial planner living in Manhattan. When she married football hero Dan Swain, the two were perfectly matched, good-looking up-and-comers. Then he blew out his knee and turned into a “bumbo”: a slacker who sponges off his hard-working wife. By the time their divorce is final, Melanie is glad to be rid of him, but she’s not so glad about the alimony she’ll be paying for years to come. When Melanie realizes that the payments stop if Dan cohabits with another woman for 90 days, she hires a matchmaker to lure her ex into new love. The plan succeeds a little too well. Not only does Dan fall head-over-heels for a gorgeous veterinarian, but this dream girl also inspires him to take a shower, put on a suit and find a job coaching football. Meeting the new-and-improved Dan, Melanie wants him back. Any woman who has dumped a loser only to see him become another woman’s Prince Charming will feel a twinge of pathos here, but such sympathy will last only until she remembers that Melanie is the diabolical creator of this sorry situation. She engineered Dan’s transformative romance with Machiavellian determination and, in the process, manipulated and lied to several people—including Dan. Melanie tries to explain why her love of lucre supercedes ethics or decency (her mother died when she was small; her father was a poor provider; she equates money with security), but this isn’t enough to make her appealing. Heller may hope that the phenomenon of well-paid women supporting their less-successful exes will become talk-show fodder—indeed, the prologue features Melanie protesting that there really are a lot of women just like her—but Heller’s story this time out doesn’t succeed as entertainment.
Unlikable heroine, mean-spirited plot.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-059925-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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