Plenty of action, but far-fetched and joyless.
Bad decisions and even worse men endanger the orderly lives of close friends Charlotte and Janine.
As the stunning third trophy wife of charismatic African-American Reverend Curtis Black, Charlotte Black seems to have it all, including two adorable kids. But appearances are deceiving. Her husband spends most of his time on the road promoting his bestselling book, and he barely speaks to her when he is home, making her suspect that his needs are being met by someone else. And her five-year-old daughter Marissa seems disturbed, taken to playing with fire and saying shockingly antisocial things to her mother and older brother Mathew, while maintaining a sweet-as-pie façade in front of her father. The child’s bad-seed behavior brings up some serious issues, since Charlotte believes her little girl is not Curtis’s child, but rather the result of a disastrous affair she had with schizophrenic Aaron Malone. Clever Charlotte managed to keep the real lab results hidden, but her lie gets in the way of Marissa receiving the treatment she needs. Meanwhile, Charlotte’s best friend Janine has man troubles, too. Her deadbeat boyfriend Antonio seems resigned to not working, prompting Janine, a college professor, to ask him to leave. That doesn’t sit well with Antonio, who begins selling drugs out of her home as well as mentally abusing and threatening her. Terrified by this sociopath, she reports him to the cops, and he is arrested. Janine refuses to bail him out, which only makes him angrier, resulting in an inevitable, violent confrontation. Charlotte, in a somewhat confusing attempt to make her husband jealous, befriends his long-lost “brother” Larry, a recovering addict. Larry is truly bad news, and if anything, his criminal behavior makes Charlotte’s philandering preacher man look good in comparison, paving the way for a possible reconciliation. This latest potboiler from the author of Changing Faces (2006) keeps the scandals coming, but it would have benefited from a little more character development. It is often hard to believe that two strong women could have such consistently poor judgment when it comes to men.
Plenty of action, but far-fetched and joyless.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-089249-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
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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