SPEAK SOFTLY, SHE CAN HEAR

Name: SPEAK SOFTLY, SHE CAN HEAR
Author: Pam Lewis
ISBN: 0-7432-5539-9

by Pam Lewis ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2005

Nicely written first effort, though the sensational plot often undercuts what might have been a sophisticated take on the...

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A perfect murder takes its psychological toll on a shy, conscientious girl.

In 1965, when she’s 16, Carole Mason, all in one night, loses her virginity and her future as a good Manhattan upper-middle-class girl. Carole, a lawyer’s daughter, passes for a social outcast at Spence, the exclusive girls’ school she attends, by dint of her plump figure and her family’s roots in suburban New Jersey. As the story begins, Carole’s slender, careless, rich girlfriend Naomi has convinced her to take turns having sex with Eddie, a handsome 26-year-old unemployed actor, during a school ski vacation in Vermont. But Eddie has invited a surprise tutor—Rita, a 28-year-old working-class woman from town—and the combination of alcohol and Eddie’s exotic sexual predilections results in Rita’s death. Eddie and Naomi conspire to hide the body—and to convince Carole that she’s the one who killed Rita. The impressionable Carole believes them and spends most of the next decade in guilt and flight, sacrificing all contact with her family, her education at Vassar, her social position, and her inheritance. She makes her way first to San Francisco, where she holes up in a hippie commune with Rachel, a former teenage mother, and Rachel’s young son, Pepper; then to Vermont, where she starts a restaurant and takes a lover, Will, a kind, decent survivalist guy who, being black, is nonetheless a dicey choice in ’70s Vermont. The vile Eddie dogs Carole at every turn, showing up in unlikely guises to disrupt each new phase of her life. When Eddie and the equally repugnant Naomi team up, marry, and move to town, the scene is set for a second lethal showdown—which, though inventively plotted, is less psychologically satisfying than Carole’s fraught reunion with her cold yet surprisingly kind father.

Nicely written first effort, though the sensational plot often undercuts what might have been a sophisticated take on the murder-mystery genre.

Pub Date: March 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-7432-5539-9

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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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.