A capable though lackluster second novel from Colombian-American novelist Cobo (Tell Me Something True, 2009) about an American man searching Bogotá for his birthmother.
The book begins in Colombia during the era of guerrillas and paramilitary fighters and small towns that are captive to their power struggles. A quiet village is invaded by a group of guerrilla soldiers from the mountains, and their leader Gato has taken a shine to Rita Ortiz, a prim, studious girl. Armed and dangerous, Gato, or Lucas, is really just a boy himself, and the two teenagers sneak off for afternoon trysts. When his commanding officer discovers the affair, Lucas is sent back to their mountain camp as punishment. This could have been merely a bump in Rita’s well-planned life, but soon she discovers she’s pregnant and is sent away before she shames her strict family. She lives in an orphanage while pregnant and works at a flower farm, giving up her baby as soon as he is born. Despite having been a top student with dreams for a prosperous future, Rita stays away from her family and takes a job as a maid. Her baby is adopted by an American couple; two decades later, after a near-fatal car accident (one that ruins his future as a soccer player), Asher Stone goes to Colombia in search of his mother. Though he has caring parents, he asks the same questions many adopted children have: Who I am, I and where do I come from? How Rita Ortiz disappears and reemerges as Joanna López is a far more interesting story than Asher’s search for answers, and when the novel leaves Rita it slows to a halt with Asher’s musings about his origins. It is not clear why his brush with death has sent him halfway around the world. Instead of a focused urgency, his search holds a kind of vague desperation that loses the reader’s attention.
Pub Date: Feb. 29, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-446-51938-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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