A gratifying follow-up that will leave readers clamoring for more.
Driver-Thiel’s (The World Undone, 2012) sequel continues the story of Anne Bennett, a woman who, after a personal upheaval, must reconnect with her two estranged daughters.
For most of her adult life, Anne has been a reserved, unemotional woman. In a companionable yet loveless marriage to Henry, she has what seems to be an ideal life: affluence in a house that “had been featured in New England Designer Showcase Homes.” Anne wants for nothing—nothing except perhaps to forget about her rebellious daughter Sylvia. Seven years ago, just before her wedding in the previous book, Sylvia ran away to the unlikely state of Michigan. Not only that, but she had threatened to force Anne to meet Sylvia’s half sister Callie, whom Anne had given up for adoption as a teenager. The one to whom Anne, through her lawyer, had paid a hefty sum to never speak with again. However, when Henry dies suddenly from a heart attack, she learns that his business is under federal investigation. Nearly all her assets frozen, Anne moves in with her sister Julia. The visit goes from unpleasant to intolerable, so when Anne receives an invitation from Sylvia, she accepts. Anne is again reluctant, though, for she doesn’t know how or if she will ever repair their relationship, and she dreads seeing Callie, who lives and works nearby. In order to cobble together an entirely new life, Anne must challenge deeply rooted beliefs about herself and her family as she confronts emotions she has pushed down for far too long. Fans of Driver-Thiel’s first novel may be surprised by the shift from third- to first-person narration here, all in Anne’s point of view. They will likely understand, though, as Anne certainly has a lot of explaining to do. Through the story, Anne shifts from a model of arrogance and cruelty to a more receptive, pragmatic woman willing to accept and attempt to change her own faults. This progression is slow, almost imperceptible, so although readers may sometimes feel that Anne’s bouts of introspection are a bit lengthy, the overall impression of her transformation is satisfyingly realistic. In Driver-Thiel’s capable hands, the story hits its target: the possibility of redemption in even the unlikeliest of people.
A gratifying follow-up that will leave readers clamoring for more.Pub Date: March 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9886568-2-6
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Pine Lake Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
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.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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