Jaskunas’s debut uses the assault not as a mystery to be solved but as a trapdoor into a suffocating nightmare of false...
Six years after sending her husband to jail for an attack that nearly killed her, an abused wife learns that her assailant may have been someone else.
There’s no doubt that for all his charm and wealth—his father is one of the premier real-estate moguls in southern Indiana, and he’s a romantic who won Maggie Wilson after a whirlwind courtship—Nate Duke is too free with his hands. He’s punched his bride, pulled her hair, and knocked her down in episodes that begin in shows of affection but can escalate with frightening suddenness to something else. So it’s no surprise when Maggie, beaten and left for dead in the family farmhouse she shared with Nate, identifies him as the perp. Now, stunningly, a born-again prisoner slated for release includes Maggie’s assault in the catalogue of crimes he’s eager to confess to, adding that he’d stalked her for weeks before confronting her. Her home, her habits, her outfit, the circumstances of the night in question—he knows so many impossible details that he soon persuades the prosecutor to reverse Nate’s conviction and set him free. Maggie, who’s never answered any of Nate’s impassioned letters from prison, forces herself to revisit the evidence, looking back over her rapidly failed marriage in the hope of figuring out what went wrong (Nate’s irrepressible flirtatiousness? his father’s contempt for women? Maggie’s affair with the police reporter she was thrown together with as obituary editor at the local newspaper? the epilepsy that may have distorted her reactions and recollections?); at the same time, she looks forward in a strenuous attempt to imagine what will happen next if everyone else is right and the evidence of her eyes and ears and memory is really wrong.
Jaskunas’s debut uses the assault not as a mystery to be solved but as a trapdoor into a suffocating nightmare of false love, delusion, and sad dreams of escape.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5748-0
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
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
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.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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