A tale of a woman’s childhood and adulthood employs both sweet clichés and genuine reflections on the passage of time.
A woman navigates change and growth while reckoning with memories of her youth in this debut novel.
Jill at first seems to have an idyllic childhood. Her adoring, artistic mother, Rebecca, is raising her in the Garden, a sprawling homestead full of creative horticultural designs. But Jill has just turned 10 and increasingly asks questions about the frequent absence of her father, Jay, a renowned photographer often away on assignment for months at a time. The Garden remains a paradise, but Jill’s struggle to decode her complicated family riddles is further challenged when her mother gives birth to a baby and tragedy strikes shortly after. Jill’s best friend, Susie, supports her throughout but must struggle with her own mother’s alcoholism. In interspersed chapters told parallel to this childhood tale, a grown Jill is trying to get her garden-ware business off the ground when a chance encounter with the handsome and spontaneous Charlie changes her life forever. The two feel an instant, deep connection, but their romance is complicated by personality differences and Jill’s memories of her past. As Jill grows older, some happy “endings” occur—a marriage, a successful business—but time continues to bring new challenges and realizations. Some elements of Jill’s life are so sentimental and picturesque that they border on the unrealistic or clichéd, yet Leet’s best passages utilize this almost saccharine quality by contrasting it with real change and pain. The book’s many episodes feel sometimes leisurely or overly wandering and random, and its characters likewise can read both as two-dimensional types sharing platitudes and as real individuals meditating on the nature of happiness. Charlie and Jill’s early courtship, for example, feels like a sketch of a romance lacking real characterization (Jill ultimately loses her virginity to Charlie, but the reason she stops waiting is never fully explained). Yet the give-and-take of their adult marriage resonates far more effectively, mirroring the well-written, alternatingly cheery and sad dynamics among Jill, Rebecca, and Jay.
A tale of a woman’s childhood and adulthood employs both sweet clichés and genuine reflections on the passage of time.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-943826-33-9
Page Count: 425
Publisher: Antrim House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2018
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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