Occasionally long-winded but, nonetheless, a comic glimpse into the life of addiction.
A doorstopper-sized third novel from Keyes (Watermelon, 1998; Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married, 1999) exhibits her signature wit but is sometimes slowed by exposition.
From the family introduced in Keyes's first outing, we're introduced to Rachel as she's coming out of a New York hospital after a drug overdose, an episode she's just chalking up to another night of partying. And when her sister flies to New York to escort her home to Ireland to enter into a treatment center, she can't fathom what all the fuss is about. But thanks to Dad, who has virtually had her fired from her job, her boyfriend Luke, who breaks up with her, and childhood friend Brigit, who is kicking her out of their apartment, Rachel "decides" a holiday back home might be nice. And it's not just any treatment center, but the Cloisters, Ireland's own Betty Ford Clinic, filled with celebrities and offering what Rachel assumes will be a two-month vacation. How wrong she is. With not a rock star in sight, Rachel soon discovers that the Cloisters is a no-nonsense place, a little dingy and filled with middle-aged alcoholics (how depressing), druggies (how nasty), and an assortment of other addicts who are nothing like Rachel, just a fun-loving gal. Denial is the operative word, and Rachel soon discovers that it's everybody's modus operandi: to listen to the inmates, no one has a problem. Still, thanks to all-day therapy sessions and a Gestapo-like nun for a counselor, Rachel concedes that perhaps she overdid it on occasion, and when ex-boyfriend Luke comes to testify that her 24-hour drug use ruined their relationship, Rachel breaks down and begins to heal. Though she offers a lively cast, Keyes too often lets her pace slow when explaining the journey to acceptance and recovery, a damper on the story's humor and appeal.
Occasionally long-winded but, nonetheless, a comic glimpse into the life of addiction.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-688-18071-X
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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