Wearing its liberal heart on its sleeve, the 13th novel by National Book Award-winner Settle has the same historic sweep and personalized politics as her acclaimed Beulah Quintet (Charley Bland, 1989, etc.). Settle's protagonist is a woman of the century, a tough lady who, confronted by the major events of her time, feels the need to stand up and be counted. Her story begins in Richmond, Virginia, where Melinda Kregg slowly realizes there's more to life than debutante balls. After her father's death, Melinda devotes her exemplary life to assuaging her guilt over inheriting his ``blood money,'' made from investments in coal mines. As a Red Cross volunteer, she ventures to Kentucky, where she rebels against bureaucratic neutrality during a strike because it punishes innocent children. With no illusions about manipulative communists and fellow travelers—especially the lecherous Theodore Dreiser, who makes a cameo here—Melinda is changed by the murder of her party member lover. Run out of town, she eventually lands in Manhattan, where she adds auto mechanics to her diverse skills—all of which come in handy when she sets off for the Spanish Civil War. Amid a number of melodramatic gestures, Melinda meets her future husband, an English baronet who later becomes a saintly doctor in London and a pioneer of National Health. In Spain, Melinda adopts a speechless orphan. Years later, after her husband's death and her adopted daughter's move to the States, Melinda returns home for her last great struggle, the fight for civil rights. Again, she finds herself mothering an orphan, a young black man whom she supports through college and law school. Settle covers a lot of ground in her breathless account of romantic idealists in a tumultuous century. A counter-myth of the southern belle, this entertaining and fully imagined re-creation would make a great miniseries. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-47699-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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
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
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