A would-be feel-good story about alienated mothers and daughters brought together by a terrible disease. Middling.
A well-crafted if underplotted debut novel in which a daughter learns to forgive her high-maintenance, Elvis Presley-obsessed
mother after a fatal illness brings the two together for those obligatory healing moments. Silvie Page begins her story as she packs for her honeymoon, then goes back to the subject of her childhood and Mom—or Mimi, as an exasperated Silvie soon calls her. Chapters describing Silvie’s childhood alternate with descriptions of her arrival in New York after graduation, hoping to be an artist; her temp jobs that lead finally to great job on a magazine with a tough but tenderhearted editor; and her falling in love with, and eventually marrying, Scotty Perlman, an ER physician. As for the other side of the story: Mimi married Dan Page to get away from her own demanding family, who had immigrated to Mississippi in flight from the Nazis. Her great claim is that she later once had a date with Elvis Presley—the details vary, but her devotion to "The King" never falters. While little Silvie played at her own childish games, Mimi would dance in her blue suede shoes to Presley records or sew the flamboyant outfits that so embarrassed her daughter. Bored and unhappy, Mimi complained to Silvie, competed with her, mortified her in public—even took up drawing to prove she was better. As she grows older, Silvie becomes ever more determined to get away as soon as she can from a mother for whom "ordinary came hard." But a year after Silvie moves to New York, Mimi calls to say she’s undergoing chemotherapy for ovarian cancer. A visit at Thanksgiving finds Mimi, though fighting hard, obviously dying. Silvie decides to come home in an attempt to understand her mother and forgive her for the injuries of the past before it’s too late.
A would-be feel-good story about alienated mothers and daughters brought together by a terrible disease. Middling.Pub Date: March 14, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50282-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2000
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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