An entertaining, discerning take on the connections between the Old and New West.
A mixed martial arts fighter draws on the spirit of his mountain-man ancestor during a precarious Western journey in this debut novel.
Brendan “Bear” Glass is an MMA combatant whose raw power has won him some fame. In his latest match, he is beaten to a pulp by his opponent and ends up in a bloody pile on the floor. He is astonished to learn that his manager had given him rat poison in order to make the bout gorier. Badly injured, he won’t fight again, so he connects with his nephew, Branch. Brendan plans to build an enormous marijuana-growing facility under the guise of a luxury gym and resort in Montucky—backwoods Montana. The goal will be to transport the weed from California to the new site without getting stopped by the police. Two hundred years earlier, Hugh Glass, Brendan’s ancestor, an old mountain man, takes the same journey, though for Hugh it is just after the Lewis and Clark expedition. Hugh is a former sailor, plunderer, and survivor of a notable bear attack. He’s killing time as a fur trapper, waiting six years before he and his partner go back to retrieve some treasure they hid after stealing it from a French pirate. In the present day, Brendan is gripped by a sudden pain and detours to an abandoned sweat lodge, the same one that Hugh recovered in after the bear attack. There, Brendan makes a mystical connection to his ancestor that may help him with his uncertain future. Gaddis’ novel unleashes a flurry of Western sights and sounds that stretch from St. Louis to Mendocino, California, in two wildly different centuries. The old times, inside Mandan Indian villages and Colonial forts, are described in forthright, heedful language, while the contemporary story holds on to similar circumspection (“Now it’s an arid collection of collapsed lean-tos, yurts, willow benders and dilapidated canned ham trailers amid weed-ridden garden plots with fallen fences”). Amid the book’s brisk plot, the exploration of the roots of Western families is impressive, depicting the players as cunning self-starters in a diverse world of opportunity and peril. While Brendan’s dreams of a hydroponics empire aren’t quite as alluring as the tale of Hugh and the bear, they are similarly scrupulous and analogous in spirit.
An entertaining, discerning take on the connections between the Old and New West.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9981646-1-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Shitaree Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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