While unapologetically gross, the book is ultimately motivational in its own peculiar way.
Donley’s (Farmer Tice #2, 2017, etc.) collection of illustrated stories chronicles the mishaps of an ill-fated farmer named Tice.
Farmer Tice can’t seem to do anything right. He tried to see the movie Snow White and the Seven Farmers only to find himself wedged between two awful theater patrons. During a stint in the Army, he was nearly court-martialed for wearing a colonel’s uniform. Then there is the fact that nearly everyone he encounters seems to want to get money out of him. Take for example when Tice was caught fishing without a license and received a $100 fine for the error. Sadly, for all of the abuse the Job-like farmer receives, he doesn’t get much in return. His obese wife, Honeybunch, despises him (“You should have known better, you idiot!” she says when he is fined for grilling hot dogs on the beach although she packed the hibachi), and it is many a night that Farmer Tice has to sleep in the barn (where he should feel himself fortunate if some animal does not eat an article of his clothing). All told, Tice is a dimmer Wile E. Coyote if there ever was one, falling off cliff after cliff only to appear again for more torment. The fun of the book comes in seeing how high the next cliff will be and when exactly old Tice will stop falling. Albeit all those falls are not for the squeamish. The stories make frequent use of bathroom humor (as with a New Year’s Eve misadventure: “the result of guzzling prune juice—the backdoor trots!”), and the accompanying illustrations only help to clarify where all those bodily fluids wind up. On the positive end, nothing seems to keep Farmer Tice down for long. Despite all the barf, fines, and his own intolerable marriage, he still has fields to plow and a barn roof under which he can rest his weary head. Regardless of one’s station in life, one can learn a lot from a farmer who won’t let his consistently poor luck keep him down.
While unapologetically gross, the book is ultimately motivational in its own peculiar way.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5304-3410-7
Page Count: 108
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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