This kind of import is definitely an acquired taste.
First novel about two Londoners sabotaging the wedding of a social-climbing chum.
Melanie Pepper and her best friend Fran are miffed beyond belief when Amanda Phillips manages to get engaged to Scottish laird Fraser McConnell. Isn’t it enough that Amanda is petite, perky, blond, and rich? Melanie and Fran were sure all the Right Hons were taken—or gay. Granted, Amanda’s intended dresses shabbily, and his ancestral castle is a pile of rubble, but his title is real enough, and they remember Fraser from their school days as really rather nice in his odd way. Melanie and Fran know that Amanda’s only marrying him for his noble pedigree and a chance to get her picture in the papers, but there’s nothing they can do about it but sulk and drink and scheme. Though she’d like to save Fraser, Melanie has too many other men in her life to worry about: Alex, her ne’er-do-well boyfriend, who dreams of making it big in rock music; and Nick, a hapless accountant who warms her bed when Alex isn’t around. Then Amanda sniffily informs her two friends that they’re not quite what she has in mind for bridesmaids—although, of course, they can attend the pretentious ceremony and contribute a silver place setting or two. Fueled by gallons of alcohol and limitless spite, Melanie and Fran hatch a plot and enlist Fraser’s younger brother, Angus, to help plant smoke bombs at the church and ruin the wedding. The ensuing stampede propels Fraser into loving arms, right where he apparently belongs. Colgan has a lively style, but this malicious little love story is awfully British and awfully brittle: all the girlish shrieking, tacky sex jokes, and class snobbery wear thin in a hurry.
This kind of import is definitely an acquired taste. (Film rights to Warner Bros.)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-446-52647-9
Page Count: 278
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King's newest is a gargantuan summer sausage, at 1144 pages his largest yet, and is made of the same spiceless grindings as ever: banal characters spewing sawdust dialogue as they blunder about his dark butcher shop. The horror this time out is from beyond the universe, a kind of impossible-to-define malevolence that has holed up in the sewers under the New England town of Derry. The It sustains itself by feeding on fear-charged human meat—mainly children. To achieve the maximum saturation of adrenalin in its victims, It presents itself sometimes as an adorable, balloon-bearing clown which then turns into the most horrible personal vision that the victims can fear. The novel's most lovingly drawn settings are the endless, lightless, muck-filled sewage tunnels into which it draws its victims. Can an entire city—like Derry—be haunted? King asks. Say, by some supergigantic, extragalactic, pregnant spider that now lives in the sewers under the waterworks and sends its evil mind up through the bathtub drain, or any drain, for its victims? In 1741, everyone in Derry township just disappeared—no bones, no bodies—and every 27 years since then something catastrophic has happened in Derry. In 1930, 170 children disappeared. The Horror behind the horrors, though, was first discovered some 27 years ago (in 1958, when Derry was in the grip of a murder spree) by a band of seven fear-ridden children known as the Losers, who entered the drains in search of It. And It they found, behind a tiny door like the one into Alice's garden. But what they found was so horrible that they soon began forgetting it. Now, in 1985, these children are a horror novelist, an accountant, a disc jockey, an architect, a dress designer, the owner of a Manhattan limousine service, and the unofficial Derry town historian. During their reunion, the Losers again face the cyclical rebirth of the town's haunting, which again launches them into the drains. This time they meet It's many projections (as an enormous, tentacled, throbbing eyeball, as a kind of pterodactyl, etc.) before going through the small door one last time to meet. . .Mama Spider! The King of the Pulps smiles and shuffles as he punches out his vulgarian allegory, but he too often sounds bored, as if whipping himself on with his favorite Kirin beer for zip.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0451169514
Page Count: 1110
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1986
BOOK TO SCREEN
This is the sort of book that stirs one so deeply that it is almost impossible to attempt to convey the impression it leaves. It is the story of today's Exodus, of America's great trek, as the hordes of dispossessed tenant farmers from the dust bowl turn their hopes to the promised land of California's fertile valleys. The story of one family, with the "hangers-on" that the great heart of extreme poverty sometimes collects, but in that story is symbolized the saga of a movement in which society is before the bar. What an indictment of a system — what an indictment of want and poverty in the land of plenty! There is flash after flash of unforgettable pictures, sharply etched with that restraint and power of pen that singles Steinbeck out from all his contemporaries. There is anger here, but it is a deep and disciplined passion, of a man who speaks out of the mind and heart of his knowledge of a people. One feels in reading that so they must think and feel and speak and live. It is an unresolved picture, a record of history still in the making. Not a book for casual reading. Not a book for unregenerate conservative. But a book for everyone whose social conscience is astir — or who is willing to face facts about a segment of American life which is and which must be recognized. Steinbeck is coming into his own. A new and full length novel from his pen is news. Publishers backing with advertising, promotion aids, posters, etc. Sure to be one of the big books of the Spring. First edition limited to half of advance as of March 1st. One half of dealer's orders to be filled with firsts.
Pub Date: April 14, 1939
ISBN: 0143039431
Page Count: 532
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1939
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