A guilty-pleasure page-turner despite its obvious flaws.
Brown revisits the Winstons of her debut, The Shirt Off His Back (2001); the tight-knit family must once again battle queen bitch Catherine Hawkins.
Seven years ago, Catherine fought Terry Winston for child custody (really just a ploy to improve her image—yes, the woman’s that cold). She lost and has rarely seen her twin girls Alisa and Ariana since. Having raised the girls single-handedly since their birth, Terry is now married to Jackie, and the family includes her twins and Terry and Jackie’s own son. They are a happy, prosperous African-American family in Dallas, but just wait until Catherine gets back on the scene to ruin everything. In the intervening years she has parlayed her business success into a multinational empire, backstabbing and dirty dealing all the way into an L.A. mansion, a private jet and boy toys at the ready. But now Catherine needs a kidney transplant, and while money can’t cure her, her daughters can. She shows up on the girls’ prom night to share the special occasion, but really to see which of the two she can manipulate into becoming a donor. Proud, furious Alisa speaks her mind, but softer Ariana agrees to become a donor, secretly hoping that this act of filial selflessness will inspire Catherine’s love. Fat chance, and everyone knows it (especially outraged Jackie), but it can’t be denied that Ariana’s kindness is inspiring. A few subplots are tossed into the drama: Catherine is planning on major layoffs and outsourcing, making a couple of dangerous enemies, and Jackie, feeling less than the mother she’s always been to the girls, suspects that Catherine may have secrets that could further damage the family. Though the writing lacks subtlety and the plot is a soap opera told in broad strokes—Catherine is BAD, Terry is GOOD—Brown does offer some keen insight in her depiction of Jackie: conflicted, jealous and devoted to keeping her family together. When it’s discovered that Ariana has a malformed kidney, Catherine’s salvation rests on Alisa’s shoulders—will she come through for her much-hated mother?
A guilty-pleasure page-turner despite its obvious flaws.Pub Date: May 30, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46945-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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