An enjoyable, humorous debut with great appeal to younger readers and those whose identity-formation has hinged on their...
One gay man's down-home coming-of-age story.
Debut novelist Perronne presents a believable and engaging cast of characters in this quiet tale of self-realization. Mason Hamilton, the lone son of a lower-class southern family, falls for his best friend, Billy, in a town whose biggest industry is a peanut-processing plant. Though little in the plot distinguishes it from other coming-out stories–teen misfit flees the conservative confines of home and town for the more liberal embrace of the big city, where he finds the courage to explore his identity–the tale’s dual setting in rural Mississippi and pre-Katrina New Orleans contributes to its unique charm. When Billy, who also turns out to be gay, hops on a New York City–bound bus the night of their high-school graduation, Mason is completely alienated from his surroundings–until a bottle-blond stranger rescues him from an interminable summer of ice-cream scooping at Spence’s 32 Flavors by introducing him to the local gay “club” situated in a barn. Teenaged Mason’s exposure to such like-minded company inspires him to pay a momentous visit to his sympathetic Aunt Savannah, who just so happens to own a New Orleans drag club. This contrast of worlds provides the answer to Mason’s silent wishes: “The majority of people were so terrified of sexuality that in my eighth-grade health class the chapter in our textbook containing the words penis and vagina had been ripped out. Here on Bourbon Street sexual images were thrown in your face, and they made it impossible for you to ignore them.” Perronne’s free-flowing passages and well-tempered sarcasm make the novel a pleasant one-sitting read, and the cliffhanger ending, as Mason chases after his first real love, will leave readers pining for more.
An enjoyable, humorous debut with great appeal to younger readers and those whose identity-formation has hinged on their sexuality.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 1-58348-463-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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