Awfully trite, but distinguished by delicious, sharply observed scenes of San Francisco’s various neighborhoods and...
Debut fiction from memoirist Holm (The Toaster Broke So We’re Getting Married, 2002) charts a year in the lives of a group of San Franciscans struggling to find love, maintain love, get over lost love.
After two miscarriages, Macie and her husband, Harlan, now have mechanical sex timed to the results of her ovulation tests. “The firecracker he’d married, with the scathing wit and the survivalist’s demeanor, seemed to be disappearing in front of him,” Harlan thinks. Ergo, the formula goes, he’s a sitting duck for a sluttily dressed “birdcage dancer” named Sophia, who brings him home to her mirrored apartment in a converted firehouse and brings lust back into his life. Before long, Harlan has ’fessed up to Macie, moved out and found his own place. His landlady, Dawn, is a single mom who has recently split up with a long-time partner and moved into a house on a hill with her nine-year-old daughter, Jewel. Harlan tries to write a screenplay. Macie continues her quest to become a mother by trying artificial insemination. Sophia takes a string of ridiculous gigs, like standing on street corners in Vegas-style costumes to be picked up by busloads of Japanese tourists. Dawn transforms her talent for drawing bugs into a paying job in pest control and tries to keep up with Jewel, a delightful, vividly drawn character who walks away with most of the story. Harlan helps Dawn and Jewel transform the messy backyard into a garden with exotic plants. Dawn’s ex gets engaged, reviving her own ambiguity about the state of marriage (Jewel is the result of a drunken one-night stand with a man who was in costume at the time). Then Macie becomes pregnant, and—guess what?—Harlan begins to find Sophia not so seductive after all.
Awfully trite, but distinguished by delicious, sharply observed scenes of San Francisco’s various neighborhoods and inimitable seasons.Pub Date: May 17, 2005
ISBN: 1-59692-118-8
Page Count: 230
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
The Dukes of Hazzard written as if it were a homiletic drama.
An irritatingly hokey, inept attempt to invade Fannie Flagg territory.
Ave Maria Mulligan, a pharmacist in Big Stone Gap, discovers she has a long-lost Italian father, saves Elizabeth Taylor from choking on a chicken wing, and follows her friend Iva Lou's advice and gets her a workingman. It's 1978, and Ave Maria's mother has passed away, leaving a letter stating that mean old Fred Mulligan wasn't her daughter’s real father. It's unclear why Mama never told anyone, but Ave Maria's father is Mario Barbari, a boy she knew back in Bergamo. Iva Lou Wade—a promiscuous, worldly-wise woman who calls everyone “honey-o” or “sweetie-o”—drives the Bookmobile. She finds a book on Bergamo that just happens to have a picture of Mario. Ave Maria, who ruminates incessantly, is reeling from all this news and, in a truly bizarre move, sells her pharmacy—for one dollar—to Pearl Grimes, a poor, overweight teenaged girl she'd recently hired. Meanwhile, Ave Maria lusts after the high-school band director, who initially spurns her. She, in turn, is the object of Jack Mac's affection, though he proposed to someone else on stage on the closing night of the Outdoor Drama, which Ave Maria directs. Ave Maria is also a member of the rescue squad and, when Elizabeth Taylor comes to town with her husband, senatorial candidate John Warner, to attend a high-school football game, she helps the choking actress get to the hospital. To add insult to cornball, the blushing, bumbling Jack Mac woos a surprised Ave Maria by selling his precious pickup truck to pay for her father and aunts to come to America. The couple will wed and name their child Fiametta Bluebell. Trigiani lacks subtlety, and the fun is lost in the desire to be taken seriously.
The Dukes of Hazzard written as if it were a homiletic drama.Pub Date: April 4, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50403-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
A fun and fast-moving read, and better edited than many of Laurens’ past efforts. Highly recommended.
A straight-laced Glasgow businessman is drawn back into clan politics and a romance with a woman from a neighboring estate.
Laurens (By Winter’s Light, 2014, etc.) returns to her popular Cynster series with this romantic mystery set in mid-19th-century Scotland. Thomas Carrick is looking for “the right sort of wife for a gentleman of the type he intended to become—a pillar of the wealthy business community.” But a plea for help from farmers on his uncle’s estate causes him to abandon Glasgow suddenly. His wastrel cousins are taking advantage of their father the laird’s lingering illness to plunder the clan’s coffers. Thomas is determined to set things right, even though it means encountering the witchy woman on the next estate, Lucilla Cynster, who has held him in thrall for many years. Lucilla, on the other hand, has been waiting for Thomas to figure out that a marriage between them has been preordained by the Lady, a local deity embodied by Lucilla’s mother. She believes Thomas is her consort, chosen by the Lady to be the future caretaker of Lucilla and her people. Together, they work to solve the mystery of recent foul deeds on Carrick land and have fabulous sex around the edges. The book falls prey to the annoying tics common in Laurens’ prose (can you really sigh inwardly, catch your mental breath, mentally blink or rock back on your mental heels?) but is a fairly successful example of cross-genre experiments in which classic mystery and historical romance and even fantasy tropes are combined. The solution to the mystery is wonderfully unpredictable, and both Thomas and Lucilla are flawed and likable characters.
A fun and fast-moving read, and better edited than many of Laurens’ past efforts. Highly recommended.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1782-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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