A superb magical tribute to fathers, sons, and those who love them.
A supernatural thriller about a priest, his wayward son, and the voodoo sorcerer who could exploit their secret.
The Caribbean fishing town of La Croix has seen a decrease in tourism lately. This summer, a monstrous storm approaches, bringing unbearable humidity. While the older generation sees the storm in terms of angry spirits and evil omens, the young people don’t believe in magic. Jaime—son of Panon, a respected priest—only wants to work, raise money, and move to America, where riches and modernity await. He wants nothing to do with his father’s profession. The rift between father and son widens when the government is overthrown and Jaime risks his life as cheap labor during the new government’s reconstruction. Because Panon carries a secret regarding Jaime’s birth, he’s afraid to ask his patron spirit, Dela Luamba, for help. He goes instead to the new sorcerer of La Croix, Bougné, who has moved into the jungle shack of Uzoma, the previous sorcerer, who died under suspicious circumstances. Will the enchanted contents of a wooden box help Panon bring Jaime back into the fold—or is something darker afoot, better fought with a touch of ordinary magic? Author Thibeault (co-author: Recommend This!, 2014, etc.) beats a steady, foreboding drum in this unique supernatural thriller. He concocts a sinister atmosphere early on, during the government coup: “flashes of light in the distance...merged into a single glow, as if the world itself burned.” The spirit Dela Luamba brings some humor to the tale in snarky missives between chapters and in communion with Panon: “You’re such a good dancer. And you have a sexy ass.” Thibeault deftly explores both the father’s and son’s perspectives, including Jaime’s frustration with magic: “People danced and shook when they should have been discussing the matters at hand.” The story’s latter half is a claustrophobic jungle crawl punctuated by scenes of voodoo horror. In the end, the ordinary magic steering Thibeault’s incredible narrative is Dela Luamba’s to vouch for.
A superb magical tribute to fathers, sons, and those who love them.Pub Date: March 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1935893349
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Dime Novel Books
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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
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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