Runs to surprising depths, and Sammy the donkey will live long in young memory.
Dendler (Dottie’s Daring Day, 2017, etc.) addresses overcoming preconceptions in this middle-grade fairy tale.
Thirteen-year-old Bianca is known throughout the Kingdom of Pacifico as the Frail and Delicate Princess. She was very weak at birth and has spent her entire life in the castle, kept safe by her loving, overprotective father. Bianca does not feel frail and delicate. She may be cosseted (“Never…was she allowed to meet other children….Who knew what kind of diseases they carried?”), but she has grown into a healthy young girl, brimming with imagination and yearning to explore the world. Yet how can she? She is the Frail and Delicate Princess, and that is all there is to it…until a fire-breathing dragon threatens the kingdom and Bianca’s father and his bravest knights march off to do battle with it. When they don’t return, Bianca sneaks out and embarks on her own quest. With only a charismatic donkey for company, she will track down the dragon. She will save the kingdom and be Frail and Delicate no longer! Dendler writes on the safe side of scary, capturing the magical essence rather than the Grimm aspect of fairy tales. Bianca’s adventure may be straightforward, but it remains spry and charming, its message of empowerment no less effective for being overt. Primary school readers surely will empathize with Bianca (nobody should be chained by assumptions of what they can and cannot do), yet hers is not the only life being affected by pigeonholing. Throughout the story, hidden in plain sight amid the palace folk and fairy-tale tropes and exquisitely characterized animals, Dendler presents a subtler exploration of labeling. It’s to her great credit that the book’s denouement, though obvious in retrospect, comes as both uplifting and unforeseen. Bianca, all told, is a memorable middle-grade heroine.
Runs to surprising depths, and Sammy the donkey will live long in young memory.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-93829-4
Page Count: 134
Publisher: Serenity Mountain Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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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