An intriguing premise undermined by heavy-handed plot manipulation and shallow people.
A newly appointed family court judge discovers that the male defendant in her first custody case is her secret lover—and that’s only the prologue to this mix of old-fashioned romance and trendy issues like adoption, surrogate parenthood, and obsessive-behavior disorder.
After setting up the major crisis facing Judge Kelly MacLeod, how she’ll avoid presiding over a case involving her lover without dishonoring her role as judge, Thayer (Between Husbands and Friends, 1999) backs up to show how Kelly got herself into this predicament. After Kelly’s father died in Vietnam, she was raised by her mother and her father’s parents, but during Kelly’s senior year in college, her mother, under the sway of her evil second husband, absconded with Kelly’s inheritance. Suddenly destitute, Kelly acted as a surrogate mother to pay her way through law school, holding her newborn daughter just long enough to fall in love with her (and notice a small but crucial-to-the-plot birthmark).Years later, Kelly has become a highly respected lawyer when her mother reenters her life and renews their relationship before dying. On subsequent weekly visits to the cemetery, Kelly encounters an attractive middle-aged man visiting his recently deceased mother’s grave. Although they don’t exchange names at first, we know he is Randall Madison, a doctor whose soon–to-be ex-wife Anne is a rising liberal politician Kelly happens to support. Randall and Anne’s adopted daughter was born of an anonymous surrogate mother (guess who) with Randall’s sperm. Kelly, despite a disposable fiancé, and Randall fall in love while Randall and Anne fight over their daughter. The fact that Anne is an obsessive-compulsive neurotic and a wildly overprotective, occasionally violent mother while Randall is a sweetheart of a dad, his marital infidelity explained as the result of Anne’s disgust for sex, weakens Thayer’s attempts at evenhandedness late in the story—when love and humane justice prevail.
An intriguing premise undermined by heavy-handed plot manipulation and shallow people.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-27734-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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