The quirkiness feels forced, the sex dreary. Pritchard fans will be disappointed.
A middle-aged romance writer’s affair with a younger man feeds her fiction in Pritchard’s third novel (Selene of the Spirits, 1998, etc.), which aspires to comment on the genre.
Single mother Prudence True Parker teaches Advanced Personal Journey at an Arizona community college, not a gig that’s exactly making her rich. In the public toilet of her local library, she has a chance encounter with cross-dressing Digby Deeds, better known under the name “Mildred Crawley” as a wildly successful romance author. Whimsically insisting their meeting was “divinely ordained,” the dying Digby/Mildred asks Prudence to complete his Savage Passion series. All she has to do is flesh out the plots he bequeaths her, and her financial worries will end. Then, while volunteering (for reasons too strained to recount) at an Indian charity event in Oklahoma, Prudence meets Ray Chasing Hawk, a handsome if slightly androgynous Comanche with whom she shares a night of passion. Returning home to Tempe, she resumes teaching and raising her increasingly independent 17-year-old daughter Fiona. But soon Ray comes calling, and before long he’s moved in. Quite a handy coincidence, since Mildred Crawley planned her next book as a white woman/Indian chief romance. Pritchard contrasts that fantasy passion with Prudence’s less-than-perfect affair with Ray, who is angry, narcissistic, secretive about his friendships with other women, and perfectly willing to live off her money. Readers may be as bewildered as Fiona by her mother’s enthrallment, though she herself (seen as a kind of Prudence-lite) has not chosen much better. Prudence gains new respect for Ray after he undergoes the demanding rites of the Sun Dance Ceremony, and Pritchard’s depiction of the Native American culture, refreshingly politically incorrect at first, now becomes sentimentally reverential. When he discovers that Prudence has been using him as a model for her fiction, Ray feels used, but tensions are all too easily resolved.
The quirkiness feels forced, the sex dreary. Pritchard fans will be disappointed.Pub Date: March 16, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-50304-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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
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