A heartwarming, spirit-lifting read just in time for beach season.
When Lolly Weller summons her daughter and nieces home to The Three Captains’ Inn, her announcement that she has been diagnosed with cancer is just one of many life-changing secrets to be told.
March’s debut novel uses the films of Meryl Streep to illuminate these women’s lives and to drive away the shadows that dim their happiness. After their mother and father die in a car crash, Isabel and June Nash are taken in by their Aunt Lolly, who lost her own husband in the same crash. Lolly’s daughter, Kat, gains instant sisters, but grief tinges the familial bonds. Now grown up, gathered back under Lolly’s roof, and drafted into Friday Movie Nights, these young women begin to reconsider the choices they have made—and the opportunities ahead. Like the heroine of Heartburn, Isabel is reeling from her husband’s affair. Handsome veterinarian Griffin might know the sting of infidelity, as well, and Isabel is certainly drawn to him for more than their shared pain. Kat has been all but betrothed to Oliver since they were toddlers, but she’s not sure if she is more ready to marry Oliver or to run off to a Paris patisserie. Defending Your Life makes her wonder if the real shame is in missing the opportunities life offers. Perhaps the exotic Dr. Matteo Viola is such an opportunity. Like the daughter in Streep’s Mama Mia!, June’s son, Charlie, has never known his real father. To help Charlie finish his family tree project, June agrees to once more search for John Smith, but maybe Henry Books is a truer father for Charlie. And she can’t deny her own attraction to him for much longer. But which movie mirrors Lolly’s past? What secret does she hide still? And why has she watched Out of Africa only once in her life?
A heartwarming, spirit-lifting read just in time for beach season.Pub Date: June 19, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5539-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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