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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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