This odd, dark and often creepy tale of a dysfunctional community and a family that fits right in will keep readers...
Roy’s suspenseful debut novel presents readers with a rich mix of troubled characters planted against the backdrop of a small Kansas farming town and the mysterious deaths of two young girls.
In the turbulent 1960s, Arthur and Celia Scott leave rioting Detroit behind with their three children and move back to Arthur's childhood home in Kansas. His mother, Reesa, and sister, Ruth, still live there, but things have not been going well with Ruth, long married to the drunken bully who once loved their sister, Eve. The fragile blonde Eve died violently many years ago, her body found in the shed on the Scott property. The community’s consensus is that Ray murdered Eve; whether or not the charge is true, her death certainly turned his life to ruins. Soon the family settles in: Arthur and Celia’s oldest daughter meets and falls for a local boy, while young Daniel, their son, struggles to become a man in a town where he has no friends and a father who doesn’t believe in him. Meanwhile, the youngest child, Eve-ee, who like her namesake aunt is both small and fair, finds kinship with her long-dead relative, who left behind a closet of beautiful dresses and a sad statue of the Virgin Mary. When another local girl, also blonde, petite and Eve-ee’s age, disappears and is feared murdered, the Scotts reexamine the circumstances surrounding Eve’s death. Soon Ruth finds herself once again on the receiving end of one of Ray’s beatings, but this time she has Arthur to shield her. Eventually, the Scott family realizes the truth about what happened to Eve, and Ruth deals with the frightening future she faces if she stays with her husband. Roy, a former tax accountant, writes sparingly of the bleakness of life and death on a farm. In her hands, the plot twists and turns, but, in the end, all the pieces fit, although the denouement is unsettling.
This odd, dark and often creepy tale of a dysfunctional community and a family that fits right in will keep readers wondering right until the last page.Pub Date: March 31, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-525-95183-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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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