A light, fast read that provides equal measures of quirky fun and heavy-handed allegory, though it struggles to transport...
Eckhardt (The Remedy Files: Illusion, 2014) creates colorful worlds, from bleak to bright, in this surreal, slightly hallucinatory novella about an abducted woman, possibly magical fireflies, and an enigmatic spiritual guide.
Evaline watches a firefly splatter on the windshield of her car as it crashes. Then she wakes up in a strange world of darkness. The first person—entity, really—she meets there is the Sun. When asked what she was searching for, Evaline says, “a place I feel safe and happy…a real home.” Agreeing to help her, the Sun transports her to a series of different worlds. The first is Nogmestead, an idyllic country town that conceals a malicious totalitarian edge. Just as Evaline finds friends in local mediator Namaste Majie and librarian Bookend Rasha, she is forced to flee and wakes up in another realm, the land up in the sky. There, she meets FeFe, the woman who paints the sky, and learns the secret power of imagination that will allow Evaline to do the same. The next time Evaline sleeps, she wakes in the sea of fishes, where she finds something that just might one day lead her to her one true love. Finally, the Sun appears to Evaline again and she must make a choice: where will she call home and, more importantly, who will she be? Evaline’s story is a short one filled with colorful allegory, unique characters, and solid, sometimes-pretty prose. The episodes that make up the main thrust of the plot are relatively simple, leaving much to be desired in terms of a thoughtful, challenging allegory. Evaline’s journey isn’t terribly surprising or philosophical, either. The surreal, beautifully described opening is one of the book’s strongest moments. Unfortunately, the subsequent magical lands don’t reach that initial spark.
A light, fast read that provides equal measures of quirky fun and heavy-handed allegory, though it struggles to transport readers as easily as it shuffles around its main character.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1505870343
Page Count: 66
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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