A moving novel about an unwavering affection that begins in a time of adversity.
In Jones’ debut historical novel based on actual events, a romance between a young mother and a pilot blossoms after a ship is stranded in South West Africa during World War II.
In 1942, Alison Habib travels to Cairo on the Dunedin Star, a cargo liner that also carries 12 passengers. She’s only 22 years old and is accompanied by her 18-month-old daughter and Egyptian husband. The ship strikes a sandbar unexpectedly and must be abandoned, so the passengers and crew brave tempestuous Atlantic waters until they reach the shore of South West Africa (now Namibia), called the Skeleton Coast. After multiple rescue missions fail, the survivors are forced to attempt a 700-mile overland trek to a military outpost. During one of the unsuccessful rescues, a pilot, Lt. Russell Townshend, lands on the beach in a B-25 bomber but is unable to take off again, stranding him with the others. Alison immediately feels drawn to the newcomer, and the two pass the time in rapt conversation. She keeps a diary of the experience, which she ultimately gives to one of her best friends—author Jones’ wife. In an extraordinary coincidence, Jones later orders a book about the shipwreck in 2003 from a bookstore owned by an elderly, infirm Townshend; he soon decides to give Townshend the diary as well as a letter that Alison wrote but never sent. Jones ambitiously braids several different narratives together into one coherent tapestry: Alison’s ordeal on the Dunedin Star; his wife Joanne’s friendship with her; his own history with his wife; and the attempt to communicate with Townshend in the twilight of his life. As a result, the story is a bit cramped, especially due to the fact that it’s so brief, but Jones is careful to avoid causing readers any chronological confusion. It helps that the tale is a powerfully dramatic one about survival in the face of unexpected danger and about a love that spanned decades. Lurking subtly but poignantly in the background is the author’s own love story, which seemingly inspires Alison to share a lifelong secret.
A moving novel about an unwavering affection that begins in a time of adversity.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4834-6824-2
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2017
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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