A tepid read, with cardboard characters and contrived situations.
Thayer picks up where she left off with The Hot Flash Club (2003), introducing a new batch of women who band together to solve one another’s in-law problems.
The meeting of like minds takes place at the Hot Spot Spa run by the postmenopausal ladies who formed the original club and who, sensing common needs, throw the new girls together in the hot tub. Intellectual graduate student Beth, 26, is finding it hard to adjust to fiancé Sonny’s blue-collar jock family, particularly because his hateful mother plots against her. Slightly older Julia, a special-events video-maker, has recently married Tim, a gentle widower whose daughter has not spoken since her mother’s death. Julia adores little Belinda; the problem is Belinda’s maternal grandmother, who resents the new wife for taking her dead daughter’s place. Slightly up the age ladder, 37-year-old Carolyn is pregnant and worried about her blood pressure, which is not helped by her executive position at her family’s multimillion-dollar paper mill. She and loving husband Hank, an environmentalist, share the family manse with Carolyn’s widowed father. They live companionably in separate wings until Dad comes home with a new young wife, whom Carolyn quickly senses is not as innocent as she seems. Oldest is Polly, a widow whose hippie daughter-in-law won’t let her visit her new grandson because she might bring germs from her former mother-in-law, a lonely snob entering the last stages of cancer who demands Polly’s slavish care. After brief catch-up appearances by the founding Hot Flash gals, the new characters commiserate and plot against their bad relations. With Julia’s help, Beth catches her mother-in-law-to-be’s villainy on tape and blackmails her into submission. Julia’s stepdaughter finally speaks, bringing her family together. Helping Carolyn expose her stepmother as a con artist, Polly and her mother-in-law bond. And eventually Polly gets to see her grandson.
A tepid read, with cardboard characters and contrived situations.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46917-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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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