First-novelist Canty (stories, A Stranger in This World, 1994) offers a tale of teenage love more engaging in its details than in the full-dimensioned pull of its characters. Troubled and sensitive Kenny Kolodny is 17 and unhappy at home when he falls in love with his very classy classmate Junie Williamson, winning her away from the girlfriend rumored to be her current lover. Whether Junie has been a lesbian does matter to Kenny (who's got nagging doubts about his own sexual preferences), but nowhere as much as the differences between his family and hers. Junie lives in a good part of town (in a Frank Lloyd Wright house with ``rock walls''), her father is a lawyer and her mother—though with troubles of her own—a successful pediatrician. On Kenny's side of the equation are an institutionalized mother and an abusive, deeply alcoholic father. Not surprisingly, he tells Junie little about his family while becoming more and more familiar with hers—and with Junie herself, whose bedroom allows all the privacy and privilege any pair of lovers with hyperindulgent parents carefully looking the other way could possibly wish. Where the true center of Kenny's woes really lies may not always feel completely clear—or real—to the reader, but he's already smoking a lot of dope and well on the way to dropping out of school when he finds his father is felled by a stroke; and when Junie turns up pregnant, Kenny sweeps her up and wafts her westward—though the two don't get far before life turns in a direction they hadn't expected, reasserting itself with a mundane power that will take Junie, if not to college, then toward it, and Kenny back home where for the next ten years, the suggestion is, he'll ache and pine. Canty can be stylistically engaging, but love at 18, this time around, remains an adolescent affair, however much it strains for the significant and high.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-47388-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
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
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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