This insightful study of relationships is a party that’s not to be missed.
A weekend getaway takes an intense turn in Farewell’s (Hilda’s General Store, 2015, etc.) latest novel.
Bess and Mitt Blasdale own the Evergreen Inn, a haven for rest and relaxation in the picturesque Vermont countryside. A snowstorm foils their plans for a large house party, though a few hardy souls manage to make the trip. Bess’ old and dear friend, Sadie, drives down from Maine despite the blizzard, and Olivia Rathbone and her husband, Simon, are delivered by Gregg Galleon, a good Samaritan who rescues them after their car overturns on the road. The small group is snowed in at the Evergreen without phones or access to the outside world. Despite the weather, it should be an enjoyable weekend spent in the company of good food and friends. Unfortunately, it turns out that Gregg is Sadie’s ex-husband, a recovering alcoholic whose tryst with her sister ended their marriage. In addition, Bess reveals that she’s planning to leave Mitt and sell the inn, while Olivia and Simon constantly snipe at each other and quarrel over his post-retirement lifestyle. Tensions are high as the six snowbound inhabitants navigate around awkward silences, marital disappointments, and long-buried feelings of anger, sorrow, frustration, and loss. Sadie is adamant that she can’t forgive Gregg, but a dark turn of events causes her to rethink her position. Farewell’s novel feels much like a play as she skillfully sets the stage and populates her narrative with witty and complicated characters. The cozy Evergreen Inn is the perfect backdrop for scenes full of nuanced character development and well-scripted dialogue. Olivia, for example, is a Pandora’s box of judgment, ego, and hypocrisy who incessantly pecks at her retiree spouse. Yet Farewell manages to balance Olivia’s flaws with characteristics that render her admirable and even likable at times. Throughout the novel, the author provides ample opportunities for the characters to hash out their problems and air their grievances, peeling away the complicated layers of emotions like a chef with a sharp paring knife.
This insightful study of relationships is a party that’s not to be missed.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-68419-588-6
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Puddingdale Press
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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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