With a little modification, this is a lively and uplifting poem to share aloud with children, or for adults and children to...
A short lyrical celebration of innocence, childhood wonder and the constancy of family love.
Favoring impressionism over narrative, Meyers’ paean to the joys of childhood packs a lot of picturesque imagery into its 37 lines. From loved ones to games, from junk food to elves, from the wonders of nature to the comforts of home, Meyers covers the gamut of childhood adventure, imagination and pleasure. The idealized childhood envisioned by this poem is one of unfettered curiosity, active exploration and engagement with the world and unconditional love. Though no singular narrative voice asserts itself amid the rapid-fire succession of images, the refrain of “Hugs and Kisses with Lots of Love” that closes each of the eight stanzas suggests a giver of hugs and kisses, a kindly singer behind the song, and reveals the song itself to be an invocation of blessing intended for her young listeners. Employing a heterometric rhythmic structure, Meyers produces some interesting and fun lines in unexpected ways. For instance, by interspersing some trochees and using feminine rhyme, she is able to shape dactyls, traditionally associated with serious and elegiac verse, into lighthearted lines such as “Marshmallows crispy all gooey and yummy / Open your mouth and fill-up your tummy.” Not every line works quite so well, but the prevalence of trochaic lines—long used in nursery rhymes and famously by William Blake in Songs of Innocence and Experience—along with an abundance of action-evoking present participial forms and a semiregular rhyme scheme, make reading this poem aloud a pleasurable shared experience—with one unfortunate exception. The metrically dissonant refrain, repeated eight times throughout the poem, tends to bring each stanza up short, jarring the reader from the fun and fast-paced flow of the previous lines. The poem reads significantly better if all iterations of that line, except the last, are skipped.
With a little modification, this is a lively and uplifting poem to share aloud with children, or for adults and children to recite together.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2011
ISBN: 978-1434965516
Page Count: 8
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2011
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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