Fans of the Leelee novels (and of Kissie) will be happy to find their heroine’s life happily resolved, though the occasional...
Patton’s third novel featuring Southern belle Leelee Satterfield (Yankee Doodle Dixie, 2011, etc.) is rich on atmosphere and charm if short on plot.
After her husband, Baker, convinced her to move from ancestral Memphis to Vermont to follow his dream of owning a B&B and then left her for the artificially enhanced owner of a ski resort, Leelee is happily back home in Memphis and on the verge of opening her own restaurant. Chef Peter Owen (who was at her inn in Vermont) is working with Leelee to make the transplanted Peach Blossom Inn the finest French restaurant in Tennessee. They are also working together on a soul-mate kind of romance, although his Yankee directness takes some getting used to, as does Leelee’s Southern politeness (or lying, as Peter would call it). Leelee is finally taking some ownership for her life, which is a big step for someone raised to be a daughter and a wife. Thankfully, she has Kissie for guidance, Leelee’s old nanny who is now looking after her daughters, Sarah and Issie, doling out mammy-style wisdom and sassiness in equal measure. Then Leelee gets a cease and desist letter from a lawyer: the current owner of the Peach Blossom Inn in Vermont (the evil Helga) has copyrighted the name, and Leelee’s restaurant can’t open until everything is sorted out. When ex-husband Baker comes scooting back for reconciliation, Leelee considers it for the sake of the girls, though it drives Peter away. Patton has a large cast of loopy characters, offering all the comedy in the story. If only there were a little bit more story.
Fans of the Leelee novels (and of Kissie) will be happy to find their heroine’s life happily resolved, though the occasional slog through insignificant details may test their patience.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-02065-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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