Big issues masquerading as light fun. Highly entertaining.
Lord Berrybender and brood continue their western exploration, in this second in a four-part series (Sin Killer, 2002).
Tongue still wedged firmly in cheek, McMurtry throws his supremely confident band of aristocrats up against the toughest challenges, including a buffalo stampede, hostile Indians, wretched weather, and bloody-minded mountain men. None is rougher than Lady Tasmin Berrybender’s handsome husband Jim Snow, the gifted trapper and brutally fundamental Christian whose distaste for Tasmin’s erudite and occasionally profane chatter leads him to paste her one in the kisser. Two actually, one to the temple and one to the mouth, her pregnancy notwithstanding. Leaving Tasmin to ponder the error of her ways and the mystery of his, Jim strikes out alone, to clear his head and give his ears a rest from the incessant prattling of the diminished but still large brood of aristos and their retainers. Their river transport having been crushed by the frozen Missouri and the crew having been hacked to pieces by angry natives, the Berrybenders have holed up for the winter at a trading post where time and pregnant bellies hang rather heavy. Tasmin, irritably sorting out her feelings for Jim, has the ardent attention of tongue-tied Kit Carson and the artistic attention of painter George Catlin, who has in mind an epic American allegorical tableau featuring Tasmin and her father’s equally gravid ex-mistress Vicky. Meanwhile, the errant Jim Snow decides to reclaim his two Ute wives, who will show Tasmin the right and silent way to go about being a wife. Alas, the senior and more competent wife has died in his absence, but the teenaged number two proves to be a superb nanny after Tasmin is delivered of a son, Montague. Will Jim warm to his heir? Will he deal with those pesky anger management issues? Will Tasmin learn to control her tongue? Will she come to terms with bigamy? Will there ever be a meeting of the minds between the overcultured Europeans and the oversimplifying Americans?
Big issues masquerading as light fun. Highly entertaining.Pub Date: May 13, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-3303-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
A fine and touching novel, persuasive proof of Tóibín’s ever-increasing skills and range.
This plaintive sixth novel from the Booker-nominated Irish author (Mothers and Sons, 2008, etc.) is both akin to his earlier fiction and a somewhat surprising hybrid.
Tóibín’s treatment of the early adulthood of Eilis Lacey, a quiet girl from the town of Enniscorthy who accepts a kindly priest’s sponsorship to work and live in America, is characterized by a scrupulously precise domestic realism reminiscent of the sentimental bestsellers of Fannie Hurst, Edna Ferber and Betty Smith (in her beloved A Tree Grows in Brooklyn). But as Eilis both falters and matures abroad, something more interesting takes shape. Tóibín fashions a compelling characterization of a woman caught between two worlds, unsure almost until the novel’s final page where her obligations and affections truly reside. Several deft episodes and set pieces bring Eilis to convincing life: her timid acts of submission, while still living at home, to her extroverted, vibrant older sister Rose; the ordeal of third-class passenger status aboard ship (surely seasickness has never been presented more graphically); her second-class status among postwar Brooklyn’s roiling motley populace, and at the women’s boarding house where she’s virtually a non-person; and the exuberant liberation sparked by her romance with handsome plumber Tony Fiorello, whose colorful family contrasts brashly with Eilis’s own dour and scattered one. Tóibín is adept at suggestive understatement, best displayed in lucid portrayals of cultural interaction and conflict in a fledgling America still defining itself; and notably in a beautiful account of Eilis’s first sexual experience with Tony (whom she’ll soon wed), revealed as the act of a girl who knows she must fully become a woman in order to shoulder the burdens descending on her. And descend they do, as a grievous family loss reshapes Eilis’s future (literally) again and again.
A fine and touching novel, persuasive proof of Tóibín’s ever-increasing skills and range.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-3831-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
An epic of treacle, an ocean of tears, made possible by a perfect, ideal, unalloyed absence of humor. Destined, positively,...
Sparks's debut is a contender in the Robert Waller book-sweeps for most shamelessly sentimental love story, with honorable mention for highest octane schmaltz throughout an extended narrative.
New Bern is the Carolina town where local boy Noah Calhoun and visitor Allison Nelson fall in love, in 1932, when Noah is 17 and Allie 15 ("as he...met those striking emerald eyes, he knew...she was the one he could spend the rest of his life looking for but never find again''). Allie's socially prominent mom, however, sees their Romeo-and-Juliet affair differently, intercepting Noah's heartrendingly poetic love-letters, while Allie, sure he doesn't love her, never even sends hers. Love is forever, though, and in 1946 Allie sees a piece in the paper about Noah (he's back home after WW II, still alone, living in a 200-year-old house in the country) and drives down to see him, telling the socially prominent lawyer she's engaged to that she's gone looking for antiques ("'And here it will end, one way or the other,' she whispered''). And together again the lovers come indeed, during a thunderstorm, before a crackling fire, leaving the poetic Noah to reflect that "to him, the evening would be remembered as one of the most special times he had ever had.'' So, will Allie marry her lawyer? Will Noah live out his life alone, rocking on his porch, paddling up the creek, "playing his guitar for beavers and geese and wild blue herons''? Suffice it to say that love will go on, somehow, for 140 more pages, readers will find out what the title means and may or may not agree with Allie, of Noah: "You are the most forgiving and peaceful man I know. God is with you, He must be, for you are the closest thing to an angel that I've ever met.''
An epic of treacle, an ocean of tears, made possible by a perfect, ideal, unalloyed absence of humor. Destined, positively, for success. (First serial to Good Housekeeping; film rights to New Line Cinema; Literary Guild selection)Pub Date: Oct. 11, 1996
ISBN: 0-446-52080-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Warner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996
SEEN & HEARD
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