A salon owner–turned-invalid-turned author struggles to make sense of her life, and sometimes so do we.
The roller-coaster tale of a chatty Dublin woman rendered speechless, then renewed by the love of a good doctor—and a terrible literary agent.
From the Brontës to Maeve Binchy to Helen Fielding, British and Irish writers have long specialized in diarylike stories of ordinary women thwarted by unusual circumstances. The Limerick-born Keyes, now on her 13th novel (The Mystery of Mercy Close, 2013, etc.), offers an entertaining if choppy take on the genre. Her heroine, Stella Sweeney, shuttles between the present and recent past to unpeel a quirky love story. While muddling through a mediocre marriage blessed with two surly teens, Stella is felled by a sudden illness that confines her to the hospital for months, unable to move or speak. As her husband grows petulant and her children, more distant, Stella finds herself connecting only with her handsome neurologist, the perfectly named Mannix. He draws an articulate wisdom out of his patient that much of her rambling narrative doesn’t lead us to expect, and the two of them start a stormy relationship after Stella has healed and both their marriages have crumbled. When it turns out that—why not?—the doc has gone ahead and self-published a collection of bedridden Stella’s bons mots, it somehow winds up in the hands of the U.S. vice president’s wife in a photo in People (yes, that’s as convoluted as it sounds). Thus begins Stella’s new career as a memoirist, feeding the American hunger for nuggets of clichéd advice resulting from extreme hardship. Her journey involves Manhattan, money-grubbing publishers, highbrow beauties, oddball relatives, and a lot of phone sex. It’s a fun romp, as they say, but be sure to bring your suspension of disbelief to the book release party.
A salon owner–turned-invalid-turned author struggles to make sense of her life, and sometimes so do we.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-42925-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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