Good fun abounds when JCOW Enterprises sets up business and Harley’s life becomes "a rough approximation of things hoped...
In Swivel, Wisconsin, a cow named Tina Turner has birthed a calf with Jesus’ image on its flank, "the standard doe-eye Lutheran hippie iteration."
Drawing small-town characters out of central casting, Perry’s tale ripples with simple-life nostalgia. Tina Turner’s owner, Harley Jackson, says, "Well, that’s trouble" after seeing the calf’s "above average stencil of the Son of God." Forty-something Harley lives alone on the remnants of his parents’ farm. Most of the land was gobbled up by an interstate highway and the machinations of developer Klute Sorenson, who learns business strategy from audiobooks like Stomp Your Way to Success: A Clodhopper Walks All Over Wall Street. Harley’s best friend, supersized Billy Tripp, a trailer-living, clog-wearing cat fancier, wisely knows there’s money to be made when folks begin "assigning meaning to coincidence." At a staff meeting over bottles of Foamy Viking beer, Billy urges reluctant Harley to cash in and finance "undevelopment" of Klute’s tacky McMansions. Then the calf is seen by Harley’s mail carrier. Believing it miraculous, she calls the Rev. Gary at the Church of the Roaring Lamb. Soon, Sloan Knight of International Talent Management jets in, because there’s "a hard horizon on long-term marketability thematics." Another fly in the ointment is Carolyn Sawchuck, former professor and current environmentalist, who survives on EarthHug tea and Little Debbie Zebra Cakes while secreting used motor oil in Swivel’s abandoned water tower. Add a tow-truck–driving, junkyard-owning widow; a techno-gadget–entranced fire chief; a Barney Fife constable; and town newcomer Mindy, a sculptwelder who breaks Harley’s heart, and it’s sure to end with a bang.
Good fun abounds when JCOW Enterprises sets up business and Harley’s life becomes "a rough approximation of things hoped for."Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-228991-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
