A very human, very pleasing makeover of the standard Americans-abroad narrative.
A lighthearted comic tale about three friends who move to a South American villa and get more than they bargained for.
Charlier’s (Drive for Dough, 2014, etc.) latest short novel features a trio of Iowa friends: practical, cerebral Katie, high-strung Lisa, and compassionate, thoughtful narrator Monica. They met in group therapy in Des Moines, Iowa, two years earlier; after getting to know one another, they decided to uproot themselves from their settled, slightly boring existences and take a chance. It’s an adventure that will be familiar to readers of books such as Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence (1989) or Frances Mayes’ Bella Tuscany (2000): they travel to a foreign land to have a go at a new life. Five years before, Monica bought Hacienda Nusta in arid, south-central Bolivia, but when she and her friends decide to go there to turn it into a tourist destination, it’s fallen into discouraging ruin: “The courtyard itself was nothing but weeds, bare dirt, and broken paving stones. The fountain I had taken pictures of five years before was missing.” As the three women grapple with the protracted repairs to give their hotel dream a chance of success, they try to adapt to their new surroundings. At the same time, the inherent tension of the situation brings strong emotions to the surface and tests the bonds they formed back in Iowa. Charlier effectively peppers her familiar scenario with plenty of plot complications, including an alluring stranger who’s camped out on the hacienda’s property (and quickly becomes Monica’s love interest) and rumors of a “werecat” prowling the chaparral. The author’s keen ear for dialogue is reliable and enjoyable, and she has sure instincts when dramatizing the spiky nature of adult friendship, relating the women’s story with natural pacing and humor. At one point, when most of the plot complications have settled down, one character asserts that “[y]ou have to learn to look forward in your life for joy.” In this novel, Charlier has crafted a confidently joyful story.
A very human, very pleasing makeover of the standard Americans-abroad narrative.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1502597038
Page Count: 280
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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