Swedish author Cobbold (The Purveyor of Enchantment, 1998, etc.) offers another winning discourse on relationships, once again distinguished by her piercing humor and incisive perspective on the usually skewed path of human interaction. The opening pages flip-flop between two children, a terminally sullen London girl and a dreamy Swedish boy connected only by the correspondence of their mothers. Perpetually astonished by the idiocy of adults, Esther dreams of looking into the minds of others, while Linus draws a more perfect world. He grows up to be a scatter-brained genius haunted by a desolate childhood; she remains the same cynical charmer, fangs in the bosom of her strange family. When the two meet some two hundred pages into their own story, Esther is a journalist fighting to save pensioners from the wheels of progress, Linus the architect whose opera house is to replace the old couple’s cottage. Despite these inauspicious circumstances, the two are primed for love: Linus is sad and alone after the break-up of his marriage, Esther convinced that romance is a pretty shady concept. Though things go well in their first encounter, the situation deteriorates as the pair’s individual codes of ethics do battle. But when Esther is sent to Linus’s summer house to nurse her vacationing mother’s broken hip, she falls madly (and we do mean madly) in love with him. Too bad her paper’s publicity has ruined his dream of the opera house. Too bad that the perfect Pernilla is always hanging about. Too bad that someone in the family is trying to poison Linus’s father. Esther, the novice in love, enacts a variety of amusing schemes to win her man’s heart, including ye olde message in a bottle, but not until they both return to England does the triad of all true romance—malice, passion, love—begin to bloom. A large cast and bizarre subplots (Linus’s oddball family, Esther’s breakdown in a London cafÇ) make for an engaging read, that, with any luck, should broaden Cobbold’s audience.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-019449-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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