A messy love story packed with nostalgia.
A teenager moves from a run-down, coal mining town to an artistic haven in this debut novel.
Eighteen-year-old Daniel McHale is just about to graduate from high school when tragedy strikes: His single mother suddenly dies, leaving him and his twin brother, Dustin, uncertain about their futures. Daniel, the dreamier of the two, confides in Jane Hatfield, the owner of the local bookstore, who tells him that if he wants to make anything of himself, he needs to leave town. Luckily, she has a friend who rears horses in the city of Jenningsburg who’s looking for a hired hand. Soon Daniel is off to a new life of hard but fulfilling labor for tough, good-natured Kathy Delaney, who moonlights as an artist and helps nurture his love for antiques and historic buildings. Everything changes, though, when Daniel meets Amelia Branagan, a violist in a Celtic band who visits Jenningsburg every summer: “He knew this one was special. He wasn’t sure why yet, he just knew his soul was singing, his heart was tingling, and his stomach was alive with hundreds of butterflies dancing about.” Daniel and Amelia begin spending their weekends together, going on long hikes to waterfalls and taking a historic, steam-powered train to a restored Shaker village. Before Amelia leaves to go on tour, Daniel works up the courage to confess his love to her. But she demurs, unwilling to enter a long-distance relationship. When she returns a year later, will Daniel convince her that she’s truly “the woman of his dreams”? This heartfelt novel’s strong beliefs in the ways of the past, devoted love, and the beauties of nature are quite admirable. But Daniels’ tale, which offers two artistic protagonists, sometimes suffers from blandness and clichés, both in its main romantic plot (“Amelia’s voice was like the choir of 100 angels. Looking into her eyes was like looking at the stars”) and in the bizarre woodenness of its descriptions: “His face was slender, his nose wasn’t large, but it was bigger than the national average for a man of his age and race.” And just as the town Daniel grows up in has very few redeeming qualities, his experiences in Jenningsburg are so hyperbolically positive (“enchanting,” “magical,” “poetry would be written about it”) that the effect at times becomes numbing.
A messy love story packed with nostalgia.Pub Date: May 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68433-054-6
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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