Killing time before starting his civilian life, an Aussie sailor signs on with the crew of an American yacht and promptly falls in love with the owner's gorgeous, young fiancÇe—in a clever romance by a master entertainer. The Second World War has been over for seven years, but big, handsome Bryan Cavanaugh, late of His Majesty's Australian Navy, is still trying to figure out what to do with his life. He's gotten his law degree, but hanging out his shingle in Melbourne holds no appeal. Does he want Europe? The US? To support himself and his dithering, Bryan, a skilled shiphandler, has been bumming around the Med, doing whatever people will hire him to do. American millionaire Declan Molloy hires him to crew his grand new yacht, the Salamandra d'Oro. Molloy's a brooding, two-fisted rich guy who's decided to settle down long enough to marry into one of Europe's most distinguished families, the Farnesi of Italy and the Vatican. His fiancÇe, selected with the help of the Pope's closest advisors, is the astonishingly beautiful, thoroughly spoiled, and shockingly young Giulia Farnesi. The middle-class Cavanaugh finds himself in uncharted waters. Molloy's crew also includes a resourceful Cunard stewardess to relieve his sexual needs (since Giulia must remain a virgin), a couple of male American dancers, a philosophizing cook, and Molloy's lifelong Greco-American chum, who is rather more than chum. In addition to his relationship with the See of Rome, Molloy does business with the CIA—business that lands his dear friend in the hospital and puts young Bryan, badly smitten with Giulia, into the number one spot on the crew. When Molloy flies off to Naples to be with his battered pal, Giulia, Bryan, and Molloy's aristocratic guests have time to get into all sorts of interesting trouble. Very charming. It's an old song, but West (The Masterclass, 1991, etc. etc.) sure knows the words and has a great voice. (First printing of 125,000)
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1993
ISBN: 1-55611-370-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
Unrelenting gloom relieved only occasionally by wrenching trauma; somehow, though, Hannah’s storytelling chops keep the...
Hannah’s sequel to Firefly Lane (2008) demonstrates that those who ignore family history are often condemned to repeat it.
When we last left Kate and Tully, the best friends portrayed in Firefly Lane, the friendship was on rocky ground. Now Kate has died of cancer, and Tully, whose once-stellar TV talk show career is in free fall, is wracked with guilt over her failure to be there for Kate until her very last days. Kate’s death has cemented the distrust between her husband, Johnny, and daughter Marah, who expresses her grief by cutting herself and dropping out of college to hang out with goth poet Paxton. Told mostly in flashbacks by Tully, Johnny, Marah and Tully’s long-estranged mother, Dorothy, aka Cloud, the story piles up disasters like the derailment of a high-speed train. Increasingly addicted to prescription sedatives and alcohol, Tully crashes her car and now hovers near death, attended by Kate’s spirit, as the other characters gather to see what their shortsightedness has wrought. We learn that Tully had tried to parent Marah after her father no longer could. Her hard-drinking decline was triggered by Johnny’s anger at her for keeping Marah and Paxton’s liaison secret. Johnny realizes that he only exacerbated Marah’s depression by uprooting the family from their Seattle home. Unexpectedly, Cloud, who rebuffed Tully’s every attempt to reconcile, also appears at her daughter’s bedside. Sixty-nine years old and finally sober, Cloud details for the first time the abusive childhood, complete with commitments to mental hospitals and electroshock treatments, that led to her life as a junkie lowlife and punching bag for trailer-trash men. Although powerful, Cloud’s largely peripheral story deflects focus away from the main conflict, as if Hannah was loath to tackle the intractable thicket in which she mired her main characters.
Unrelenting gloom relieved only occasionally by wrenching trauma; somehow, though, Hannah’s storytelling chops keep the pages turning even as readers begin to resent being drawn into this masochistic morass.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-57721-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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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