Like the best Broadway musicals—revels in bigger-than-life moments and is filled with just enough sadness and truth.
Shaffer, author of southern-fried charmers (Family Acts, 2007, etc.), is at her best here with a multigenerational saga set amid the bright lights of Broadway.
When Rose Manning dies, all of philanthropic Manhattan shows up for her funeral. But daughter Carrie realizes the eulogies praise Rose the humanitarian, leaving Rose the human a mystery—even to Carrie. While still a baby, Carrie’s family fell apart: Her father, boy-genius Broadway composer Bobby Manning, died; Rose broke all ties with her mother Lu Lawson (musical theater’s biggest star); Rose relinquished their Fifth Avenue lifestyle and subsequently dedicated her life to helping the homeless. The press loved gorgeous Rose, the selfless young widow. But for Carrie, living with an altruistic mother left little room for happiness. Carrie decides to go in search of Rose’s past, and starts with great-uncle Paulie, Lu’s big brother, in his 80s and still living in New Haven, Conn. Paulie says the problems began with Mifalda, Carrie’s great-grandmother, a young bride from Italy. And so Carrie’s family saga begins, an entertaining mix of feminism-lite (women need self-fulfillment!) and a passionate rendering of theater life. Mifalda finds domestic life empty, though that doesn’t prevent her from planning the same for her spirited daughter Lucia. But modern little Lu has other dreams: With a musical gift and an indulgent father, it’s not long before her talents are requested at recitals and weddings. When she accidentally becomes pregnant, Mifalda agrees to look after little Rose while Lu pursues her showbiz dreams. But when Mifalda dies and Rose goes to live with the rich star Lu has become, Rose becomes embittered and disapproving. Carrie then goes to George Standish, Lu’s conductor and best friend, for the next chapter of the story—the tumultuous marriage of her parents. Self-indulgent Bobby and pious Rose couldn’t have made a worse match, but it’s not until Carrie meets her grandmother Lu that she gets the whole sad story.
Like the best Broadway musicals—revels in bigger-than-life moments and is filled with just enough sadness and truth.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-345-50209-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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