A well-written, endearing book that surprises—even if its happy ending is a little too perfect.
A story about discovering the artist within and being happy—talent or no talent.
Reed’s (Courting Kathleen Hannigan, 2007, etc.) charming new novel stars a neurotic singer with mother issues who has been avoiding auditions and attending frustrating therapy sessions instead. When Cecilia meets a homeless boy on the streets, however, her life takes a risky new direction. By involving herself in his problems, she learns to cope with her own, and she finds fulfillment in helping two troubled teens who must care for a baby while living hand to mouth. The author employs a generic plot that feels very “rags to riches” and makes it her own, using everyday issues—problems with low self-esteem, money, kids—to connect each character to the others. Reed turns ordinary metaphors into apt reflections of the characters’ inner states. Cecilia, for example, who has been stalled in her ambitions, takes up running, which depicts not only how she’s moving toward a better self, but also how she feels about her life despite her progress. To the overly self-critical Cecilia, who’s new to jogging and not especially fast, she’s always being passed, or surpassed, by others. Reed’s portrayal of human psychology is convincing. We can, for example, sense Cecilia’s anger and self-destruction every time she lights a cigarette, particularly since smoking damages her gifted singing voice. Reed sometimes resorts to telling instead of showing (“What she had yet to realize was how much she needed him”), but overall, she gives Cecilia nuanced, flawed dimension. Early on, Cecilia is often judgmental and impersonal, fearing that the boy she’s helping is immoral and even diseased. What Reed does best, though, is bring out similar aspects in all the characters. The therapist, also an aspiring sculptor, finds that like Cecilia, he’s afraid to act and move forward with his life. The homeless boy puts his talents to good use, and each character achieves new meaning in his life—through romance, new responsibilities and opportunities. Those shared traits create sympathetic, memorable characters.
A well-written, endearing book that surprises—even if its happy ending is a little too perfect.Pub Date: April 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-938314-0-6
Page Count: 287
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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