A captivating novel about five characters’ fateful decisions that should leave readers feeling inspired to make positive...
The lives of five friends intersect on their respective journeys toward happiness and success.
In this part motivational, part self-improvement debut novel, five friends obsessed with wealth and success try to turn their lives around for the better. Carrie Kendall is the granddaughter of a prosperous businessman who reassures her, “Whatever you can imagine can come true.…You have the power inside you.” Upon his death, he entrusts her with the family’s corporation, Kendall Innovations Incorporated, and she’ll do anything to ensure that she will someday become its president. Gina Stevens is her only friend, a model who has been able to skate by just on her looks. After a near-death experience, Gina remembers a card she received from a stranger after running away from home that read, “I gave my life to become the person I am right now. Was it worth it?,” resulting in a resolution to “make some changes in her life.” David Hendricks, a corporate businessman, gets caught up in a life of drugs and partying. He cheats on his wife and ignores his children. His drug dealer, Hank Johns, grew up on the streets of Las Vegas, hustling and hoping for a better situation. After a traumatic encounter with David, Hank dedicates his life to his young son, but David faces more trouble getting his act together—until he meets Sara Collins. After enduring three marriages and getting fired from her dream job, Sara follows her mother’s advice that “thoughts are powerfully creative” by starting her own event planning company called Dare to Dream. Though filled with complex characters, this novel’s plot is often summarized, giving the story a rushed quality, and the major events that become catalysts for changes in the characters’ lives rely too much on melodrama. But to De Groat’s credit, the protagonists’ odysseys toward finding stable family relationships and healthy romances are inspirational, and her message is ultimately positive. Through Sara, she reminds readers that “Love equals happiness; happiness comes from sharing with people I love.”
A captivating novel about five characters’ fateful decisions that should leave readers feeling inspired to make positive changes in their own lives.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941478-19-6
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Windy City Publisher
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2016
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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