Although the conceit of six sisters searching for their birth parents is certainly intriguing, one hopes the future books...
Launch of a projected series about six sisters who were adopted from all over the world by a mysterious Swiss tycoon.
When word comes of the death of the seafaring adoptive father they fondly called Pa Salt, his six daughters gather at Atlantis, the estate on Lake Geneva where they grew up. The eldest, Maia—each daughter is named for a star in the Seven Sisters cluster, though a seventh sister never arrived—is the only one who hasn't left the nest: she works from home as a translator. Pa Salt left a will providing all his daughters with the means to pursue their wildly divergent paths but with specific instructions that each investigate her origin. The clues provided by Pa Salt—a moonstone necklace, a set of coordinates, and a triangular stone tile—lead Maia to a crumbling mansion in Rio de Janeiro; the sole inhabitants, an old woman named Senhora Carvalho and her maid, Yara, are initially suspicious but relent when they note a family resemblance. A mammoth flashback comprises the bulk of the book. In 1927, Maia’s great-grandmother Izabela “Bel” Bonifacio, the daughter of a wealthy Italian coffee grower, is betrothed to Gustavo Cabral, scion of one of Rio’s most aristocratic Portuguese families. The Cabrals need the Bonifacio money, and the Bonifacios need the Cabrals’ social cachet. Against a backdrop of the Great Depression and the building of Rio’s giant statue of Christ, a tangled tale unspools of Bel’s affair with a Parisian sculptor, of Gustavo’s despair and forgiveness, and of Beatriz, the child of dubious parentage born to them. Maia’s interview with the dying Beatriz reveals additional startling clues about her lineage. The novel churns through a lot of exposition and logistics before racing to a satisfactory payoff. Maia’s frame story seems almost an afterthought, though—the Bonifacio-Cabral saga is clearly the main event.
Although the conceit of six sisters searching for their birth parents is certainly intriguing, one hopes the future books will achieve a better balance between past and present.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5990-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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
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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