An engaging novel written by women, about women whose flaws are as appealing as their strengths.
An exotic vacation turns into a nightmare in Frisbee and Farnsworth’s novel.
Lily, Grace, Penn, Deedee, Cat and Amelia have been friends for over 12 years, leaning on each other for support as they weather marital woes and challenging children. Their husbands—golfing buddies who initially introduced the wives—are all flawed in their own unique yet unappealing ways. The men are inattentive, cheaters, liars, self-absorbed, immature or alcoholics. The wives are largely long-suffering traditionalists who outwardly accept the lot they have been given and attempt to maintain their marriages by placating their husbands. Internally, the women struggle with their own unhappiness and insecurities. Yet the lives they work so hard to maintain begin to crumble during a spontaneous trip to the Isle of Capri, Italy. Lily, a fashion designer, can’t turn down an exciting professional opportunity and invites her friends to accompany her to Italy. They depart for Capri, anticipating a relaxing escape from the responsibilities of daily life. Despite high expectations, their vacation quickly turns into a battleground as the women square off and friendships begin to fracture. Each woman is forced to face the reality of her unhappy home life, and rather than pull together, the friends make moral choices whose consequences drive them further apart. Frisbee and Farnsworth use the lovely Isle of Capri as a backdrop for their story of friendship, offering a gorgeous villa and stunning scenery to complement the beautiful women. Yet the authors deliver a surprise narrative; rather than settling for light and frothy chick lit, they delve into the difficult dynamics of women’s friendships, tackling the costs of unhappiness and unrealized expectations. Set in the late 1970s, the stories of these six friends represent a changing culture for women that begins to embrace independence instead of settling for the roles of unhappy wife and frustrated mother. The story is narrated from multiple perspectives, and Frisbee and Farnsworth provide a diverse set of characters whose interactions are entirely believable while the changing dynamic of their friendships reflect reality.
An engaging novel written by women, about women whose flaws are as appealing as their strengths.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482511406
Page Count: 326
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
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