A dense, thorny romance full of multidimensional, morally ambiguous characters struggling to find peace despite sins of the...
Equal parts family drama and shadowy romance, a story about three sisters in love with the same man.
Forrest, in her debut novel, writes of love, loss and the danger of keeping secrets. Showcasing a large cast of characters, the novel centers on Laura Abbott, an international celebrity who performs under the name Cat Courtney. She’s the youngest of the Abbott sisters, musical daughters of a domineering, abusive man who murdered his own wife by throwing her into the sea years before the novel’s opening. As the story begins, readers learn that Laura is still very much obsessed with Richard Ashmore, an iconic figure from her past. Richard was her childhood crush, though he ultimately married her oldest sister, Diana. At the tail end of her traumatic childhood, Laura ran away from home, likely never to return. She made a new life for herself under her alias, married a wealthy man, moved to London and refused to accept any contact from her family. However, after her husband is killed in the attacks on 9/11, Laura yearns for the people she had sworn off years before. At long last, she returns to her childhood home in Virginia, digging up old ghosts and confronting her demons. As the complex plot unfolds, Forrest frequently peppers the present with varying layers of flashback. Laura tries to move forward and mend old wounds, revealing an increasing amount about the many secrets and mistakes of her past. As time shifts through this complicated story, readers must work hard to keep up and piece together the details of Laura and Richard’s harrowing history. The story contains unexpected darkness and foreboding that lurk in the hearts of her characters and in the themes of the story itself. A cliffhanger ending promises a sequel or two.
A dense, thorny romance full of multidimensional, morally ambiguous characters struggling to find peace despite sins of the past.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1941521014
Page Count: 522
Publisher: St. John Publishing Group, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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