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G-SPOT

AN URBAN EROTIC TALE

Raunchy and rough, but it moves.

Payback time for a good girl gone bad.

Juicy Stanfield grew up poor in Harlem. Her skank of a mother was murdered by a drug dealer, and her father’s in the crazy house. Juicy’s brother Jimmy might go the same way if he don’t get his meds. Raised by her strict but loving grandmother, little Juicy stayed good for as long as she could—but Granite McKay had his eye on her innocent ass and wanted her all to himself. “G” McKay owns the G-Spot, a club with a $1,000 cover charge frequented by rich rappers and basketball players. Upstairs: a top-secret room where his terrorized staff cuts and deals drugs. Downstairs: goodhearted hos and bootylicious strippers who slide up and down a slick dancing pole and pick up Coke bottles with—well, not their hands. Juicy, a sometime college student, gets totally turned on watching the constant action. Forty-five-year-old G is buff enuf but he ain’t no lover. Juicy gets all he has to give in ten minutes every two weeks. What did she expect? He cruel and he cold and he ready to maim or kill anyone who crosses him. But G been nice, in his way. He gave Juicy’s granny a decent burial and kept on taking care of Jimmy and turned Juicy into a well-groomed (if frustrated) urban goddess. The plot thickens when Gino, G’s handsome son by a Puerto Rican mother, turns up. He purrs sweet nuthins into her willing ear, and Juicy is ready to play with fire. Her fate: a brutal gang rape by G’s lieutenants and everybody else in the club. But you can’t keep a good girl down: Juicy escapes and goes with Gino in search of G’s cash. She can’t believe where it’s been hidden all this time but one thing is for sure: a lot of it is goin’ to good causes, not to mention higher education!

Raunchy and rough, but it moves.

Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2005

ISBN: 0-345-47721-9

Page Count: 320

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004

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SUMMER ISLAND

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

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

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

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