An engrossing but disjointed tale about familial love.
Four struggling children try to deal with a mentally ill mother in this debut novel.
Jasmine Anderson is a hustler and survivor. Her husband’s death left her with four kids—Molly May, Myron, Joey, and Allie—and little means to support them in Columbus, Ohio. Jasmine is a believer in self-help books and vision boards. Molly May tells readers: “Mom likes to say that we’re a goal-driven family on an upward trajectory.” But her children see no future success with the constant fighting, no father, and little supervision. The family fractures when Allie, the eldest, leaves home; her departure inflames her mother’s illness (“The physical symptoms that began twenty years ago are acute when I’m stressed, and there is nothing more stressful than being abandoned by your child,” Jasmine notes). Then Molly May develops deafness in one ear and Allie suffers an assault and returns home. (The retired janitor who found Allie on a bench “believes she was stabbed and beaten, maybe more.”) After Myron lands in juvenile detention for his part in a youthful stunt that kills a friend, Allie can no longer watch her family implode and becomes the matriarch. She essentially kicks her mother out of a household she no longer wishes to be responsible for (“You girls can raise the boy better than I did,” Jasmine asserts, referring to Myron). With supervision and structure, the children all achieve stable jobs and become the unlikeliest success stories. The narrative then jumps ahead to 2029, when Jasmine is released from prison in California for identity fraud. Armed with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, she must decide if she can confront her children, apologize for the chaos and abandonment, and finally heal her family. In this ambitious and absorbing novel, Knox fully commits to her stark depiction of a dysfunctional family fractured by mental illness. The author delivers a grim, realistic tale with rich details that deftly show Jasmine’s flaws. When Allie returns home after the attack, she is welcomed with an acerbic comment from her mother: “One deaf, one dumb. What did I do to deserve this?” But at times, this family’s intense suffering and arduous journey make for a difficult read. And some readers may find the timelines that jump around and the frequent narrative shifts off-putting.
An engrossing but disjointed tale about familial love.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-73308-987-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: AUXmedia
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2020
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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