Enough loose ends for another three novels, but only readers seriously in love with overstuffed plots and feisty middle-aged...
The four women who bonded in Bad Girl Creek (2001) and dealt with complications in Along Came Mary (2003) return for the allegedly final volume of Mapson’s trilogy.
As the action begins, only Phoebe and Nance are working at the California flower farm that first brought them all together. Wheelchair-bound by her heart condition, Phoebe struggles to cope with her strong-willed six-year-old daughter Sally and lingering grief over Juan, dead in a car crash before his baby was born. Nance, now married to Phoebe’s brother James, has had a series of miscarriages but is again nervously pregnant. Beryl, ditched in Alaska by her mysteriously wealthy boyfriend Earl, yearns for her girlfriends but is too ashamed to phone home. Ness is in Arizona, nursing her dear friend David through the final stages of AIDS, but she drives him back to California to see the ocean one last time and moves back in with Phoebe after he dies. The storyline isn’t exactly taut as Mapson’s characters mull over menopause, lost loves, and life’s nasty turns while making fancy Easter baskets or wondering whether the new men in their lives will cause less suffering than the last. Nance and James give Sally a horse, over Phoebe’s outraged objections; Beryl has a casual affair while wondering what the hell happened to Earl; Ness meets a handsome antiques dealer who turns out to be her half-brother. The book closes with a couple of life-changing events and a lot of unanswered questions. Will Ness ever meet the mother who abandoned her? How will spoiled-rotten Sally cope with the arrival of baby cousin Savannah? Can ornery Phoebe be happy with any man, even a courtly southerner who’s also in a wheelchair? None of this seems as charming as it did in Bad Girl Creek, perhaps because the author’s prose and plot development have been sloppier in each installment.
Enough loose ends for another three novels, but only readers seriously in love with overstuffed plots and feisty middle-aged women will hope for more.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-2463-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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