A religious sequel to Dickens’ holiday classic and an ideal stocking stuffer.
A debut novella and sequel to A Christmas Carol explores the adult life of Tiny Tim.
In 1857 in London, it’s a week before Christmas and former curmudgeon Ebenezer Scrooge has died. In Charles Dickens’ 1843 classic, Scrooge didn’t renounce his skinflint ways until three ghosts visited him on Christmas Eve. One of the people who benefited by his transformation was a crippled boy named Tiny Tim. Tim grew up under Scrooge’s wing, healing in the process and becoming a clerk alongside his father, Bob Cratchit, at the firm Scrooge & Marley & Cratchit. The death of his mentor, however, sends Tim into a depression that robs him of faith in himself and God. Meanwhile, Becky, Tim’s childhood sweetheart, has been shunned by her own family after her marriage to a cruel man fell apart. She and her young son, James, struggle to make ends meet by selling holly on London’s chilly streets. They are barely able to eat or pay their rent, and yet Becky remains hopeful, realizing that it “was the habit of despair that ultimately condemned a soul.” When Christmas Eve arrives, Tim stays late at the offices only to be joined by a familiar, if ghostly, face. Whaler captures the essence of Dickens’ characters in brief strokes, as in the description of Scrooge, who has “white hair glistening on his head and brow above a timeworn face of cavernous folds.” The author depicts the starkness of Tim’s craving for both Scrooge and Becky with pointed metaphors, including when he “felt strangely detached as if his caring was being poured onto the ground like a pitcher of water.” The main difference between this sequel and Dickens’ classic is Whaler’s extended theme of the individual placing faith in God, who “allows difficulties in people’s lives to see their faith grow, to prepare us for a higher level of faith.” There are four original songs by the author—including lyrics and sheet music—after the story.
A religious sequel to Dickens’ holiday classic and an ideal stocking stuffer.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68254-292-7
Page Count: 98
Publisher: Tate Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2016
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
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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