Best suited for readers who enjoy getting to know people through long, pleasant, one-sided exchanges over food and wine.
In Edwards’ debut novel, 62-year-old Marion von Muellerstahl relocates from Chicago to Berger, Mo., after the death of her husband to reconnect with family she hasn’t seen in nearly half a century.
The story begins as solitary Marion painstakingly remodels an old farmhouse with family history. Overly explanatory sentences shape the narrative as Marion reaches out to connect with long-lost friends and family. Exhaustive dialogue—usually over countless glasses of wine and tirelessly described dinners with new friends—affords the introspective heroine an opportunity to get out of her head as she settles into retirement. In spite of the many years that have passed since she was last in town, nearly every person Marion encounters welcomes her in with a warm, exceedingly polite and instant affection. These characters are so close to Marion that they read her mind, answering her unvoiced questions as soon as they arise. New friends and family share their personal lives, religious beliefs and thoughts on retirement and racism with an unbelievable affability. The most colorful character is Marion’s less-than-amiable adoptive cat, Snicklefritz, who expresses distaste for the slimy Dirk Dieckmann with a bite of his leg. This rambling story of congenial reunions is not completely without tension: There’s crime and mystery in Berger, after all. Most secrets are revealed in friendly conversations, and danger is brushed under the rug with tedious reassurances. Action scenes are diluted since they are indirectly related to readers. Long passages filled with emotion and apology can be tedious to read, but there’s a reward for those who stick with the narrative: The complicated weave of family ties starts to make sense. Secret identities and long-buried family scandals are uncovered and, like the rest of the story, easily absorbed. The final two chapters elevate the novel as Marion is finally thrust into real-time action. Perhaps the author presumes that readers, like Marion, need time and reassurance before confronting big emotions.
Best suited for readers who enjoy getting to know people through long, pleasant, one-sided exchanges over food and wine.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-1468121421
Page Count: 254
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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