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DANCING IN QUICKSAND

Name: DANCING IN QUICKSAND
Author: Lucille N. Payne
ISBN: 978-1503112025

by Lucille N. Payne ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 20, 2014

A promising first novel that offers a lighter-than-usual take on a deadly serious subject.

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In this debut novel, a 40-year-old woman must reevaluate her personal beliefs, dreams, and aspirations when years of domestic verbal and psychological abuse escalate into physical violence.

Author Payne spent many years working as an advocate for battered and abused women. She’s woven that experience into this genre-bending novel about the choices and conflicts faced by the fictional Pinch O’Malley. Readers first meet Pinch the morning after her husband, Steven, has beaten her. Studying the bruises on her face, the full-time homemaker and mother decides that she must begin to reclaim her life—albeit secretly, in order to avoid her husband’s wrath. She answers an ad looking for part-time help as a freelance editor, and embarks on a personal journey that defines the remainder of the novel. In an intriguing twist, the author peoples this otherwise serious volume with a cast of quirky, sometimes-bizarre characters; the most extreme is septuagenarian Lydia Wright, an eccentric former photojournalist who hires Pinch to organize her journals for a memoir she’s writing. The crusty, crass Lydia—who may have once “accidentally” shot her husband in the foot to keep him from returning to battle in Vietnam—keeps challenging Pinch to find the strength to extricate herself from her increasingly unstable environment. Overall, this novel tells an essentially moving story. However, with the exception of Pinch, her daughter, Katie, and her brother, Kevin, the character portrayals are exaggerated to the point of farce. Some sections read like quirky revenge fantasy, such as when Lydia places catnip in Steven’s hat, and he’s set upon by felines. This narrative strategy occasionally works as welcome comic relief, but it also compromises believability. Readers are pulled back and forth between theatricality and chilling encounters with Steven, who himself becomes more bizarre as the story progresses. However, the plot’s resolution is ultimately satisfying.

A promising first novel that offers a lighter-than-usual take on a deadly serious subject.

Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2014

ISBN: 978-1503112025

Page Count: 294

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: March 6, 2015

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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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.