DEAR STRANGER, DEAREST FRIEND

Name: DEAR STRANGER, DEAREST FRIEND
Author: Laney Katz Becker
ISBN: 0-380-97853-9

by Laney Katz Becker ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2000

A cutely packaged idea, and informative—it’s almost as much handbook as novel—but the two principals are tied to a script...

bookshelf

Newcomer Becker may have hoped to bring out the hankies, but this info-novel about breast cancer and close friendship—from the “scare and cheer” template that produces many a women’s magazine article—is too formulaic to trigger the tears.

When Lara, almost 40, finds a lump in her breast, she checks out the Internet before making an appointment with her doctor. Her most helpful and sympathetic reply is from Susan, a Catholic who lives in Canton, Ohio, who advises her (successfully) to see her doctor immediately. Though Lara is Jewish and lives in a New York suburb, the two, as the months pass, become close friends. Susan urges Lara to consult a second doctor when her first mammogram is negative; Lara does, and the lump is indeed malignant. The medical details, choice of treatment, and prognosis are all clearly spelled out, and there’s even an afterword by an oncologist as well as a list of Breast Cancer Resources. On the doctor’s advice, Lara has a double mastectomy followed by chemotherapy and then, when she’s healed, breast reconstruction. She shares the experience of all this with Susan, and the two also exchange information about their husbands, children, careers, and daily lives. Susan cheers, consoles, and applauds as Lara begins to recover and resume a normal life. But then Susan’s own life starts to fall apart: now it’s Lara’s turn to help the woman she calls her dearest friend.

A cutely packaged idea, and informative—it’s almost as much handbook as novel—but the two principals are tied to a script that, for all its good intentions and somber subject, never really lets things come alive.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-380-97853-9

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

bookshelf

LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

bookshelf

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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

bookshelf

DISTANT SHORES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...

bookshelf

Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.

After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).