Alamak! as they say in Singapore. Please say it isn’t over! Of course everything’s wrapped up perfectly and tied with a...
The final installment of this bestselling saga of life among the billionaires of Singapore puts the family matriarch at death’s door—which means somebody’s going to inherit her exquisite estate.
The fairy tale/soap opera/lux-a-thon that began with Crazy Rich Asians (2013) and China Rich Girlfriend (2015) comes to a fittingly majestic and hilarious end in Kwan’s third novel. When Su Yi’s health precipitously fails, Shang-Young family members from all over the globe assemble at Tyersall Park—some out of genuine concern, others to callously go after their piece of the pie (this contingent is led by the always hilariously awful and overdressed Eddie Cheng). The only two family members missing are those Su Yi is most attached to—her grandchildren Nicky Young and Astrid Leong. Nicky hasn’t spoken to his grandmother since he married beneath his station five years ago, and though he tries to rush to her side, the guards at Tyersall Park have been instructed not to let him in. How can that be? Meanwhile, Astrid is in the midst of getting engaged to her beloved Charlie Wu at a palace in India complete with elephants when paparazzi hell breaks loose, unleashing a chain of events that includes a leaked sex tape and a suicide attempt involving a Lindsay Adelman chandelier. As the sharks circle at Tyersall Park, related dramas play out around the globe, including an all-out, multicontinental war between Kitty Pong and Colette Bing. Also unfolding is the amazing back story of Su Yi’s secret involvement in World War II, which turns out to have significant bearing on her legacy. Readers who thought they didn’t like to read about rich people will quickly lose all high-minded pretensions as they revel in the food, fashions, real estate, and art so lusciously strewn through this irresistible, knowing, and even sometimes moving story. Things that are this much fun are usually illegal.
Alamak! as they say in Singapore. Please say it isn’t over! Of course everything’s wrapped up perfectly and tied with a (priceless, hand-painted, 15th century) bow—but not since we were kicked out of Hogwarts and Downton Abbey have we felt so adrift.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-54223-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2017
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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