Historical fiction that focuses less on history and more on those who survive it.
One British navy family faces the horror of two wars, forcing father and son apart—and down similar paths.
Lt. Cmdr. Charles Courtland is a loyal member of the British Royal Navy, a renowned hero who was thought to be the only survivor of the HMS Valor during World War I’s Battle of Jutland. But this experience has taken a toll on his mind, leaving him unable to adapt to life ashore or even connect with his children Anna and Brent, with father and son growing especially cold toward each other. Despite this distance, Brent shares his father’s passion for the sea and joins the navy himself, eventually coming to command a submarine at the outbreak of World War II. His reputation as a bold leader brings him notoriety and Brent is soon called upon to undertake a secret mission, one which will expose him to the horrors that scarred his father. Cordaro’s debut is well-researched and highly readable, blending historical fiction with military drama while providing a detailed look into British naval service during the early-to-mid 20th century. The novel’s primary focus is Brent’s military career, and there is some repetition in the younger Courtland’s earlier trials, including his constant clashes with higher ranking officers. This could have been more compelling if Brent was occasionally wrong in his protests, but his “wise-beyond-his-years” foresight and sense of justice isn’t developed realistically through mistakes or experiences, making them feel innate instead of a product of his growth. This perfection is thankfully tapered by his pigheadedness when it comes to the elder Courtland, and the discord with his father is an ever-present thread that holds the story together so that even when the two are not interacting their relationship is always in the background. The appearance of Winston Churchill is one of the novel’s high points, and his portrayal is handled with an honor and humor befitting the man’s legend.
Historical fiction that focuses less on history and more on those who survive it.Pub Date: March 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456339951
Page Count: 321
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2011
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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