Readers who stick around for the reveal will be rewarded with a tale about two women’s secrets that’s both entertaining and...
Old friends reminisce about their emotional high school years in this debut novel about acceptance.
Margaret MacGregor Monahan is happily married in Northern California, with kids, a husband, and her best friend, AnneMarie Calzaretta, nearby. What she can’t tell Anne is that her family may have to move to Minnesota, a secret Margaret keeps even as she prepares to host her friend’s wedding in her backyard. The two pals go way back, their adolescence documented in Margaret’s many diaries. When Anne asks to read the diaries, Margaret brings them out and recalls the beginning of high school. Summer camp brought summer romance, and her best confidante was Jennifer Cone, a sweet Mormon girl. In Margaret’s memories, high school is filled with mean girls, pep rallies, and flirtatious boys. But when teenage Anne comes to her with a secret, young Margaret struggles to respond as a friend, and as a religious person. In the present, the two women realize they’re each holding something back: Margaret confesses that she’s moving, and Anne reveals that she hasn’t been honest at work. As the two friends continue to prepare for Anne’s wedding, Margaret’s remembrances reveal that her friendship with Jennifer is indicative of something worrisome. The truth will bring Margaret and Anne closer, as teenagers and as the women they’ve grown up to be. It takes a while for this tale to warm up to its main characters, but once young Anne tells Margaret her secret, the stakes are raised and a compelling and uplifting story is revealed. The narration alternates between the drama of their high school years, and the bond of their friendship as adults, although the school portions sometimes drag (the Homecoming festivities take up nearly four chapters). Pop-culture references are frequent enough that the book could come with its own soundtrack of Van Halen tunes and modern Flo Rida songs. What could plateau as a predictable coming-of-age story takes an interesting turn when the truth about Jennifer is revealed, elevating First’s novel from a bunch of sentimental recollections to an absorbing read.
Readers who stick around for the reveal will be rewarded with a tale about two women’s secrets that’s both entertaining and surprisingly touching.Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-940716-97-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Spark Press
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
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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