An easily digestible, warmhearted tale of eye-opening friendships.
A young divorcée embarks on a journey of self-discovery during one eventful summer.
As Thayer (The Island House, 2016, etc.) opens her tale, 30-year-old Darcy Cotterill is blindsided when her ex-husband arrives in Nantucket for the summer. Not only has her ex, Boyz, brought his new wife and her 14-year-old daughter, Willow, to the island where Darcy lives year-round, they have rented the house immediately behind hers for the summer. As a woman who spends much time in her backyard garden, Darcy quickly learns more than she wanted to know about Boyz’s new family. It seems that Boyz and his wife spend precious little time supervising Willow, who has gotten involved with one of the island’s suspected drug dealers. Darcy takes matters into her own hands and befriends Willow, asserting some authority over the girl to protect her from harm. She introduces Willow to their other summer neighbors, who she hopes will be better influences. Mimi, an elderly woman who reminds Darcy of her own recently deceased grandmother, is renting the house to one side of Darcy’s, and Susan, the frazzled mother of three rambunctious boys, is renting another. Before long, this group becomes a committed foursome of friends. Under Darcy’s influence, Willow begins helping with storytime at the library instead of dabbling in drugs, babysits Susan’s frenetic kids, and acts as a companion to the elderly Mimi. As the story progresses, Darcy lands in a few confusing romantic situations of her own, and she's thankful to have these women, young and old, to help her navigate. Full of rich details about life on Nantucket, this breezy tale is at once nostalgic and hopeful. Although the prose is a bit bland, the story is filled with sweet moments of unlikely female connections.
An easily digestible, warmhearted tale of eye-opening friendships.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-96707-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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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