Absent the fish-out-of-water-in-Vermont aspect, this sequel flounders.
Second in a series begun with the well-received Whistlin Dixie in a Nor’easter (2009), in which Patton’s heroine Leelee returns to her native Memphis.
As she flees the endless winter of Vermont, Leelee Satterfield reflects that it was her ex’s dream to run a B&B in Yankee territory, not hers. It’s not an easy decision: Fiery (her nickname) redhead Leelee had turned the once mildewed inn into a thriving Southern-themed country hostel and starred restaurant, with the help of handsome chef Peter. Just before her departure, Peter, who has not hitherto acknowledged the frisson between them, kisses Leelee. Back in Memphis with two young daughters, Leelee depends on her late parents’ former housekeeper, Kissie, to handle the domestic front. Kissie, who talks like Mammy in Gone with the Wind, babysits, cooks and “Lawds” up a storm, while Leelee finds employment at Classic Hits FM 99. Her three BFFs welcome Leelee back with peach daiquiris and dubious advice. On the job, she contends with the pranks of lovable DJ Johnny and the smarmy advances of the hygiene-challenged midday jock Stan, not to mention her cold-fish boss who warns her against fraternizing with the luminaries who visit the station. However, when rock star Liam White stops by on his tour, he’s so taken with Leelee that he offers her an all-expenses-paid trip to his gig in NYC. Leelee has misgivings (she’s still hung up on Peter but her letters to him go unsent), but after assurances that her groupie status will be purely platonic, she goes. Naturally her decision results in some complications. Patton, a broadcast veteran, knows her radio, but much of the book feels padded, and the foregone conclusion is telegraphed from the beginning by the title.
Absent the fish-out-of-water-in-Vermont aspect, this sequel flounders.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-55693-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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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