Next book

MY SISTER FROM THE BLACK LOGOON

With powerful descriptions but low-watt plotting, a first novel details a sister’s acceptance of her sibling’s mental illness and her own struggle to survive. Fox, a poet, gets down pat the sensation of a walking-on-glass-life with the mentally ill, but the story itself —loosely autobiographical—told by Lorna, of life with older sister Lonnie, relies far too much on long set-piece scenes overburdened with imagery. And Lonnie, though vividly evoked, seems an elusive if immensely tragic figure, her illness never fully diagnosed. Lorna begins with their childhood in a Los Angeles suburb, where it is soon apparent that something is very wrong with Lonnie. Her emotions are volatile, she’s precociously intelligent, yet also dysfunctional, preoccupied with violence, fond of horror comics, decapitating toys, and creating multiheaded monsters with her stuffed animals. Later, Lonnie takes hormones to become the boy she feels she really is. She also dearly loves Oozy, the name she gives Lorna, who thinks Lonnie knows “stuff we can’t even imagine.” As she grows up, Lorna makes “an art out of normalcy,” trying to compensate for Lonnie’s craziness. She records her parents’ struggle to help her sister, the futile visits to doctors, hospitalizations, her mother’s growing emotional exhaustion, and the breakup of her parents’ marriage. At the same time, she is also maturing, making friends in high school, getting a boyfriend, discovering a talent for poetry and acting. But in college her normality begins to dissolve, and, haunted by Lonnie’s tragic plight, she breaks down. A long-evaded visit to Lonnie, now in a group home, helps her finally accept her family, herself, and her sister, whom she can now love and admire for her courage and her difference. Heartfelt, for sure, but told at a pace too stately to convey to readers the raw pain and tragic urgency of the situation.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-684-84745-0

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998

Categories:
Next book

LAST ORDERS

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

Categories:
Next book

SUMMER ISLAND

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

Categories:
Close Quickview