A sometimes-gripping, sometimes-discordant tale that crams a blithe love story into a lugubrious doomsday epic.
A lonely career woman finds Mr. Right during an apocalyptic plague in this debut romantic thriller.
Karis Hylen, a 38-year-old graphic designer who despairs of New York’s commitment-phobic men, escapes the flu that’s going around thanks to her fear of germs—“Every time I heard someone cough, I squirted sanitizer into my hands”—and lack of social engagements. That saves her life when it emerges that the flu is a bioterror weapon that kills everyone infected and prompts the government to quarantine all of America east of Minnesota, thus turning half the country into an anarchic hellscape. Missing the last flight out for uninfected people because the authorities won’t let her dog, Zeke, on the plane, Karis holes up in her Queens apartment while New York becomes a graveyard. She scavenges food, scans the deserted streets, panics at every noise, and fights off murderous looters. But she stays connected thanks to the internet (the utilities stay on) and calls to her parents in California. She also forges a poignant but short-lived bond with two infected little girls in a neighboring apartment before they die. Karis’ funk starts to lift when she saves an injured man named Oliver Wakelin, a wealthy English heir whose “flat, toned stomach and bare chest” overcome her wariness. Flirting and sex ensue, and the two lovers and Zeke set out for the quarantine border in Iowa, braving more homicidal gangs and the Midwestern tornado season. Mabry’s pandemic scenario is only intermittently believable. She pens an absorbing survivalist procedural on everything from making candles to siphoning gasoline, but the government’s quarantine policies make no sense. And although Oliver regularly communicates with his parents in London, they never discuss using their fortune to rescue him. It sometimes feels like New York’s collapse is just a pretext to maneuver Karis into getting her groove back with a new hunk. Still, the author’s tense suspense scenes and haunting prose—watching a suicidal woman, Karis observes that “her eyes were sad and dazed, and I swore I saw the glistening of tears before she smiled….Her face was so pale that the redness around her mouth and nose was glaring against her white skin, stained by the blood”—often succeed in conjuring a world of claustrophobic menace.
A sometimes-gripping, sometimes-discordant tale that crams a blithe love story into a lugubrious doomsday epic.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948051-33-0
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Red Adept Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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