Clearly smart and talented, Semple never satisfactorily accomplishes the difficult task of balancing nasty comedy and...
Former television comedy writer Semple offers a semi-satirical, funny-sad romance about a spoiled Hollywood wife, a former television writer, who considers risking all for a wholly inappropriate affair with a sleazy musician.
Violet is the bored, inattentive mother of one-year-old Dot and the unhappy wife to exacting music impresario David when she and bass player Teddy meet cute in a men’s room. Setting aside his greasy hair and coarse conversation, Teddy’s a junkie in AA and a self-described sex addict. Violet, who lives her life according to Stephen Sondheim lyrics, is charmed despite her revulsion. Not only does she pay to have Teddy’s car repaired, soon she is sending Dot to the babysitter and David to a yoga retreat so she and Teddy can have (graphically) dirty sex in her multimillion-dollar Richard Neutra house on Mulholland Drive. David, a self-made man who can be a son of a bitch but who genuinely loves his wife, realizes Violet is cheating and works through his anger in the yoga sweat lodge until he decides to love the marriage back together. Self-absorbed Violet is torn and distracted, but aside from when Dot sustains a minor injury due to maternal negligence, her melodrama is internal. On the other hand, Teddy has actual problems, including Hepatitis C and a lack of disposable income, not to mention that taste for drugs. His feelings for Violet remain ambiguous until he shows emotional courage as his physical strength ebbs. A subplot concerns David’s mercenary and unbelievably dense sister who marries for money and fame, only to learn that her new hubby has (horrors!) Asperger’s syndrome. Her questionable character is supposedly excused by her trauma as a diabetic, and she experiences spiritual redemption after contracting Hep-C: In an unhappy coincidence at her wedding she injects her Humalog with the same needle Teddy has used to shoot up.
Clearly smart and talented, Semple never satisfactorily accomplishes the difficult task of balancing nasty comedy and romantic uplift.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-316-03116-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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