Debut novelist Berry creates relatable characters who can laugh at themselves even when they fall down hard, but the gist of...
Best friends, both creatives, keep their wine glasses at the ready as they try to make it big without selling their souls.
Emma Derringer considers herself a writer, validated by her blog's steadily growing number of followers. But her daily life belongs mostly to “her alter ego: someone who worked in advertising and meant it.” Working at APRC is mind-numbing, but it’s supposed to be temporary. Emma’s best friend, Clementine, could never survive at an office job even though she has zero money. Recently back from a year studying screenwriting at Columbia, Clem expected to return to London on the verge of success. Instead, she has a jerk of an actor ex-boyfriend whose name is already plastered on billboards, making her feel that much worse about working nights at her old college bar. Now that these friends are in the same city again, they can at least drink away their problems together—complaining about exes and bosses from hell is a lot easier than figuring out how to make their dreams reality. In contrast to Emma and Clem with their Debbie-downer attitudes, there is Emma’s DJ roommate, Paul, who's equal parts hot mess and accomplished in his career, and Yasmin, Emma’s frenemy, who seems predictably airheaded at the start but may just be the happiest of the lot. But when Emma’s blogworthy items go from sexy encounters and wasted nights to health scares and questions of moral integrity, the tension starts to bubble over. What more will it take to get Emma and Clem to become people they actually like? Berry sustains a witty voice with an enjoyable flair for the dramatic throughout, but the actual drama of the story falls flat. The seeds are planted, fiddled with, but then dropped—many of the women's problems are solved without them having to work very hard at it.
Debut novelist Berry creates relatable characters who can laugh at themselves even when they fall down hard, but the gist of the book can be summed up when one of them approaches a problem by “produc[ing] a piece of writing about it and put[ting] it all behind her.”Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12690-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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