“What an awful, ghastly, wicked world,” says Susie. A hyperbolic one, too.
Here’s a Caribbean murder melodrama, written by a British historian who specializes in that area.
It’s the 1980s on an invented island, 20 years after it gained independence from the British; unfortunately, the island is so generic we might be on the moon. Chamberlain uses broad strokes to paint a majority black population and a white minority of former plantation owners and indentured laborers. Two women are her alternating narrators. Vanessa Francklyn's family has lived on the island for generations, and she has inherited a sugar plantation. Susie Howard is a British expatriate, an anthropology lecturer at the university (though we never see her on campus). In her mid-30s, Vanessa marries Cammy Turner, a white man who grew up poor but is now the richest man on the island thanks to his construction business. Susie has an affair with the Afro-Caribbean David Springer, poet, novelist and calypso singer, the eponymous Mighty Jester; his anti-establishment calypsos have won him a large following. David is married to Lucinda, an artist and rising star, whose patron and lover is Cammy Turner. This is way too schematic. It’s also troubling that the narrators' voices sound the same, though the women are polar opposites. Cammy turns into an abusive husband; Vanessa, a doormat wife. David is an attentive lover but low-key and passive, not protagonist material. Cammy is shot to death as a crime wave engulfs the island. There’s a big fat clue as to the killer’s identity, squelching the suspense. Still, we climb the “ladder of escalation.” David is scapegoated, arrested, tried in secret and sentenced to death. A frantic Susie flies to England and enlists legal help. Both narrators are now close to hysteria: Vanessa’s the victim of panic attacks, Susie’s the almost-victim of a strangler.
“What an awful, ghastly, wicked world,” says Susie. A hyperbolic one, too.Pub Date: June 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-615-94020-5
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Dr. Cicero Books
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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