A provocative thesis that develops into a riveting dissertation on true love.
In this love story, a chance encounter brings two doctoral candidates together just as they’re about to make the dumbest mistakes of their lives.
Patrick Murphy was considering becoming a priest when an awkward encounter with a so-called friend changed the course of his career. Now he’s engaged to Bianca Alfaro, a manipulative and demanding princess who is determined to drag him down the aisle at any cost. Their relationship devolves in both hilarious and heartbreaking ways as Patrick discovers that the way to his heart is through his head when he meets his intellectual match. Hero Delphinia Fairchild is working as an advice columnist while pursuing her doctorate in psychology when she and Patrick are paired on a class assignment. That the heroine of the story is named Hero is the first of many literary allusions and jokes about romance novels. Although the characters quote Wordsworth and visit museums, they’re not sensible enough to listen to their hearts. Scandal, misunderstandings, and bad decisions ensue as Patrick fights his lust for Hero while she grows dangerously attached to her needy boyfriend, Kamal. But Hero happily indulges Patrick’s wanderlust as they tour California, England, Spain, and Morocco while Bianca and Kamal jealously wait for them to call home. Throughout Questman’s (The Misadventures of Double Dog Darrenger & Gappy Jack Daniels, 2016) novel, the multilingual characters have lively snippets of conversations in Gaelic, Spanish, French, and, Arabic, with translations provided in a glossary at the end of the absorbing book. A variety of topics, including literature, opera, religion, psychology, history, and the couple’s mutual love for cats, makes their conversations all the more enjoyable, especially when shared with memorable minor characters like Hero’s artist mother, Lorena, and her protective brother, Dante. Although they are initially set up as adversaries, Hero and Patrick discover early on that they have more in common with each other than with their current partners, and this inspires them to actively pursue what they truly want instead of living to please others.
A provocative thesis that develops into a riveting dissertation on true love.Pub Date: June 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9973041-9-0
Page Count: 402
Publisher: Blurb
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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