A one-trick pony, with a pretty good trick.
A writer’s life is studded with celebrity appearances in this whimsical collection of linked stories.
When we meet Rose at 17 in 1963, she’s a student at a summer arts program in the Canadian countryside where an American author who has recently published a “novel about an aging basketball player” is the visiting writing instructor. But the young John Updike is less moved by Rose’s writing talent than her long, tanned legs, Bermuda shorts, and matching halter tops, and by the end of the summer Rose will have learned more about the faithlessness of men than the writing of fiction. In subsequent stories, she’ll go on a date with Bill Murray, be stalked by Charlotte Rampling, and share a stolen kiss with Bob Dylan after he mysteriously crashes her family’s summer vacation. Fourteen stories and 50 years later, she’s had a facial from Gwyneth Paltrow and liver surgery by a drunk Keith Richards, winding things up by taking a canoe trip with Leonard Cohen, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Taylor Swift. Jackson, a Canadian magazine journalist making her fiction debut, finds many ingenious ways to play this game, but the quality of the stories is inconsistent, and there’s not much to keep you going except to see which famous name is next. The most emotionally developed piece is also one of the cleverest, “Free Love,” in which Rose and her boyfriend, Nick, run into Joni Mitchell in the Cretan village of Matala. All the details of the setting come from Mitchell’s song “Carey”: the silver, the wine, the wind in from Africa, Carey himself. As Nick throws himself unabashedly into an affair with the girl in the next cave, Rose becomes increasingly miserable. As Joni puts it in a heart-to-heart at the Mermaid Café, “This free-love thing. It’s bullshit.”
A one-trick pony, with a pretty good trick.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08979-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Above-average formula fiction, making full display of the author’s strong suits: sense of place, compassion for characters...
Female rivalry is again the main preoccupation of Hannah’s latest Pacific Northwest sob saga (Firefly Lane, 2008, etc.).
At Water’s Edge, the family seat overlooking Hood Canal, Vivi Ann, youngest and prettiest of the Grey sisters and a champion horsewoman, has persuaded embittered patriarch Henry to turn the tumbledown ranch into a Western-style equestrian arena. Eldest sister Winona, a respected lawyer in the nearby village of Oyster Shores, hires taciturn ranch hand Dallas Raintree, a half-Native American. Middle sister Aurora, stay-at-home mother of twins, languishes in a dull marriage. Winona, overweight since adolescence, envies Vivi, whose looks get her everything she wants, especially men. Indeed, Winona’s childhood crush Luke recently proposed to Vivi. Despite Aurora’s urging (her principal role is as sisterly referee), Winona won’t tell Vivi she loves Luke. Yearning for Dallas, Vivi stands up Luke to fall into bed with the enigmatic, tattooed cowboy. Winona snitches to Luke: engagement off. Vivi marries Dallas over Henry’s objections. The love-match triumphs, and Dallas, though scarred by child abuse, is an exemplary father to son Noah. One Christmas Eve, the town floozy is raped and murdered. An eyewitness and forensic evidence incriminate Dallas. Winona refuses to represent him, consigning him to the inept services of a public defender. After a guilty verdict, he’s sentenced to life without parole. A decade later, Winona has reached an uneasy truce with Vivi, who’s still pining for Dallas. Noah is a sullen teen, Aurora a brittle but resigned divorcée. Noah learns about the Seattle Innocence Project. Could modern DNA testing methods exonerate Dallas? Will Aunt Winona redeem herself by reopening the case? The outcome, while predictable, is achieved with more suspense and less sentimental histrionics than usual for Hannah.
Above-average formula fiction, making full display of the author’s strong suits: sense of place, compassion for characters and understanding of family dynamics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-36410-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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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