A bland and predictable addition to a series that has had both hits and misses.
The latest Elm Creek Quilts novel (Circle of Quilters, 2006, etc.) moves west from the Pennsylvania manor to follow the adventures of Sylvia Bergstrom Compson’s older cousin Elizabeth.
In 1925 (when series grande dame Sylvia is just a child), Elizabeth Bergstrom marries Henry Nelson, who wants to give his young bride a home to match her beloved Elm Creek Manor. So Henry stakes everything he has to buy a cattle ranch in Southern California. The two pack up their wedding gifts, including a number of beautifully sewn Bergstrom quilts, and head off to what they expect will be a prosperous life. But when they arrive at the land office, poor Henry discovers he’s been duped with an invalid deed, leaving the newlyweds destitute. Luckily, the Jorgensens, rightful owners of the ranch, hire Henry to work in the field and give the decidedly genteel Elizabeth a job as housemaid. Of course, the couple could wire home for return train fare, but Henry is too proud, stubborn and ashamed to go back to Pennsylvania, so it will be a long life of labor before the two can realize their dream of owning a ranch in the rapidly urbanizing California landscape. Woven throughout is the tale of the Rodriguez family, original owners of the ranch. Rodriguez descendant Rosa is trapped in an ugly marriage from which Elizabeth hopes to save her. Meanwhile, the love triangle of Rosa, her cuckolded husband and Lars Jorgensen provides a much-needed melodramatic counterpoint to the lackluster tale of Henry and Elizabeth’s struggles. These strangely discordant plot lines merge in the guns-blazing finale that serves to rescue all involved.
A bland and predictable addition to a series that has had both hits and misses.Pub Date: April 10, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-6022-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
Griffin’s fiction-writing skills have some catching up to do with her professional expertise.
Parenting and child-development consultant Griffin’s debut interweaves the stories of a therapist and her client, a woman whose daughter is killed by a hit-and-run driver.
In a small Massachusetts coastal town, four-year-old Abby is struck down in the street outside her preschool. Her mother Tessa, frustrated by the sluggishness and apparent callousness of homicide detective Caulfield, embarks on her own investigation into the identity of Abby’s killer, compiling from public records a list of likely suspects among drunk-driving offenders. Meanwhile, Tessa’s grief counselor, Celia, seems to know more than she’s letting on about the horror of losing a child. Caulfield misplaces paint chips found at the accident scene, and his career ends in a corruption scandal. Tessa and husband Ethan hire an attorney to watchdog further police efforts. Celia has her own family fissures. Her new husband, history professor Alden, is intellectually and socially far removed from her ex, Harry, who works in a boatyard. Ever since a traumatic discovery made on his and Celia’s beloved sailboat, Harry has struggled with alcoholism and usually lost; his license was suspended after a second DUI conviction. Celia and Harry’s 15-year-old son Ian is a lightning rod in the culture clash between scruffy but lovable Harry and cerebral, supercilious Alden. (Celia herself finds childless Alden’s step-parenting efforts lame and halfhearted.) Almost catatonically depressed, his schoolwork suffering, Ian abruptly departs Celia’s orderly home for Harry’s chaotic one. Harry’s name is on Tessa’s suspect list, but she has no idea he is Celia’s former husband. As Tessa hones in on the circumstances surrounding Abby’s death, the suspense mounts briskly, despite awkward, at times clichéd prose. Tessa and Celia’s first-person voices, conveyed via journal entries, are indistinguishable. Worse, Celia’s journal is a less-than-skillful authorial artifice, allowing the author to withhold critical information until the book’s climax.
Griffin’s fiction-writing skills have some catching up to do with her professional expertise.Pub Date: April 14, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-38388-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A capable but too-quiet account of a community, missed opportunities for passion and family history.
In this debut novel, a young Indian-American woman comes to an awareness of her family, her community and the extent to which her fate rests in her own hands.
It’s 1976 and Jeeto Rai is a high-school junior in Oak Grove, in central California’s orchard region. Her older sister, Neelam, has recently married a man her parents chose for her. Neelam’s real passion, however, is for Hari, grandson of community pillar Mohta Singh who was sent away when his tryst with Neelam, and her resulting pregnancy, was discovered. Mindful of her sister’s fate, Jeeto cautiously picks her way through her own forbidden desire for local bad boy Pritam. Also unknown to her parents, Jeeto is accepted at Berkeley, but the tug of history and tradition complicates her longing to leave Oak Grove. Similarly, her own looming arranged marriage both intrigues and scares her. As a first-person narrator, Jeeto functions largely as an observer of Oak Grove’s Sikh community—non-Indians, goras, figure only peripherally in Jeeto’s world—and its sometimes inscrutable mores. There are lots of kameezes and chunis and people named Singh who aren’t necessarily related. While some observations are finely drawn—the slight of offering a visitor only water, not tea—others seem superfluous. The writing is pretty but too often uniform: Even a husband’s abuse of his wife comes across as muted. Chapters that flash back to Jeeto’s uncle’s arrival in the United States and his own ill-fated love for a Mexican waitress provide the book’s most compelling narrative motion. That back story sheds some light on the present, although the secrets revealed fall short of momentous.
A capable but too-quiet account of a community, missed opportunities for passion and family history.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-37953-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
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