Almost like an offshore Peyton Place at times, but also a well-crafted tale, subtle and memorable, that should have a broad...
Sensitive debut novel (selected by Barnes & Noble for its Winter Discover Program) about a young woman’s coming of age during WWII on an island in Narragansett Bay.
Snow Island, off Rhode Island, is not especially remote, but in the 1940s it is still without telephones and only recently has gotten electricity. There's only one store, run by Evelyn Daggett—or, rather, by Evelyn’s infinitely more efficient daughter Alice. The Daggett shop, like most of Snow Island, lives off the summer trade and gets by on credit for the rest of the year, for there are fewer than a hundred full-year residents to make up their trade. These include a fair share of oddballs, like the quahogger Owen Pierce, who practically lives on his boat and has a personal anecdote on just about any subject. There are also the usual dark scandals, like that of the Tibbits sisters, Grace and Bertha, who were found dead (one by suicide, the other of natural causes) in their twin houses one day in 1919 by their nephew George, a mainlander who has made an annual pilgrimage back ever since. It’s not a very exciting place to grow up, but Alice enjoys running the shop and acting as postmistress, and she finds herself more and more drawn to handsome Ethan Cunningham, an island boy who went off to college and returned to look after his sick mother after his father died. Alice’s best friend is Lydia Giberson, whose brother Pete is in love with Alice. But Alice becomes Ethan’s lover instead, discovering only after he moves away that she's pregnant. Pete offers to marry her, but Alice arranges to give the child up for adoption. Eventually she discovers that Ethan is married, while Pete is soon to ship off with the Navy. Should she really give the baby up?
Almost like an offshore Peyton Place at times, but also a well-crafted tale, subtle and memorable, that should have a broad appeal.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-931561-01-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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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