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COME AND GO, MOLLY SNOW

Name: COME AND GO, MOLLY SNOW
Author: Mary Ann Taylor-Hall
ISBN: 0-393-03735-5

by Mary Ann Taylor-Hall ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1995

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Taylor-Hall writes well, but little actually happens in this debut novel. Carrie Marie Mullins is a bluegrass fiddler living in Lexington, Ky. During her ``wildest-of-the-wild period,'' she makes a baby with a stranger from Georgia who's just passing through, a decision rationalized by the fact that her permanent crush, musician Cap Dunlap, is flirting with another woman. For a while she plays in a female band known as ``Pearl's Girls,'' but when Dunlap invites her to join his more successful group, she does, becoming ``a woman with a baby in a man's world.'' Then her daughter dies in an accident. Dunlap discovers her breaking down and delivers her to his grandmother's farm, where she begins to recover. This is all interesting, in a well-worn sort of way, since there's nothing new about an elusive bad-boy musician or a wild woman on the loose. But once Mullins hits the farm, she spends much too much time wandering around enjoying nature. Taylor-Hall has simply not given her narrator enough to do. There's a little feminist revelation thrown in about her own parents (``Mama, given her experience with Daddy, should have helped us change our way of thinking about men. But no. At Christmastime to this day, I still get a box of sexy lingerie—you know, teddies and silk bikinis and merry widows—with a card saying, `Love from Santa.' What kind of mother is that, pray tell?''). But all the attempts to create order—in the form of a plot—out of chaos, are too little and too late. Taylor-Hall's prose has a lyrical rhythm that does successfully imitate bluegrass music, but it's often interrupted by embarrassingly silly, folksy ruminations like ``They say a fiddler's bound to fiddle,'' or by plain self-pity. Like its main character, this novel breaks down in the middle, but it never recovers.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-393-03735-5

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

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DISTANT SHORES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...

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Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.

After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).