Newcomer Bagshawe, 25, takes the Swell Trash baton from Judith Krantz with a dead-on Hollywood hit. In an Americanization of her British bestseller The Movie, Bagshawe brings some rock 'n' roll and a few Gen-X trappings to the traditional sex-and-shopping romance, while sticking to the basics of the genre in timeless escapist fashion, with soul-wrenching copulation on navy-blue satin Pratesi sheets and equally explicit and detailed descriptions of oral sex and the secrets of makeup. Three women come to Los Angeles to make movies, have sex, and find love: Megan Silver, the mousy young scriptwriter from San Francisco, who writes a blockbuster and diets her thighs off; Eleanor Marshall, the ``ice queen'' CEO of her studio, the most powerful woman in Hollywood, who's dealing with biological-clock issues; and supermodel Roxana Felix, whose skill in bed gets her anything her perfect face and body cannot. Megan is waltzed off her job waitressing at a Hollywood fast-food restaurant by sleazoid young agent David Tauber (great pecs, no soul), who, with his classier superagent boss Sam Kendrick, is using her brilliant script as the glue in a big-deal movie package to be produced by Eleanor and her mentor protÇgÇ Tom Goldman, with whom she has been in love ever since she was a gangly young Yalie desperate for his attention. The male star will be Megan's wolf-eyed rock hero Zach Mason, who makes her his woman in a misty forest on the Seychelles; the director will be the genius of his generation, Fred Florescu; and the female star is cold and calculating Roxana, wounded as a child in ways one frequently hears about on Sally and Oprah. Smart and fun, with perhaps too much Brit label-dropping for an American audience, but distinguished by a shameless sensibility that blithely, repeatedly goes over-the-top.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-83069-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
Thoroughbreds and Virginia blue-bloods cavort, commit murder, and fall in love in Roberts's (Hidden Riches, 1994, etc.) latest romantic thriller — this one set in the world of championship horse racing. Rich, sheltered Kelsey Byden is recovering from a recent divorce when she receives a letter from her mother, Naomi, a woman she has believed dead for over 20 years. When Kelsey confronts her genteel English professor father, though, he sheepishly confesses that, no, her mother isn't dead; throughout Kelsey's childhood, she was doing time for the murder of her lover. Kelsey meets with Naomi and not only finds her quite charming, but the owner of Three Willows, one of the most splendid horse farms in Virginia. Kelsey is further intrigued when she meets Gabe Slater, a blue-eyed gambling man who owns a neighboring horse farm; when one of Gabe's horses is mated with Naomi's, nostrils flare, flanks quiver, and the romance is on. Since both Naomi and Gabe have horses entered in the Kentucky Derby, Kelsey is soon swept into the whirlwind of the Triple Crown, in spite of her family's objections to her reconciliation with the notorious Naomi. The rivalry between the two horse farms remains friendly, but other competitors — one of them is Gabe's father, a vicious alcoholic who resents his son's success — prove less scrupulous. Bodies, horse and human, start piling up, just as Kelsey decides to investigate the murky details of her mother's crime. Is it possible she was framed? The ground is thick with no-goods, including haughty patricians, disgruntled grooms, and jockeys with tragic pasts, but despite all the distractions, the identity of the true culprit behind the mayhem — past and present — remains fairly obvious. The plot lopes rather than races to the finish. Gambling metaphors abound, and sexual doings have a distinctly equine tone. But Roberts's style has a fresh, contemporary snap that gets the story past its own worst excesses.
Pub Date: June 13, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14059-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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