Others have handled the “new mommy” story more capably.
PR executive muddles her way through maternity leave.
Amy Crane used to be a take-charge kind of woman. She managed coveted accounts from her desk at a swank British public-relations agency and had steamy sex with her boyfriend, Joe. One wild night sans birth control changes everything. Now Amy’s got a new boss: her infant daughter Evie. And Evie is a demanding mistress. In an all-too-familiar plot development, poor sleep-deprived Amy can’t seem to get the hang of motherhood. She is sinking into the abyss of maternity leave, and her sex life is nonexistent. Joe’s mysterious behavior serves to exacerbate Amy’s delusions of inadequacy. She’s convinced that Joe’s getting action elsewhere, and she longs to get a grip on her out-of-control life. Amy’s crew of mom-friends from her childbirth class can’t provide any help—they’ve all resigned themselves to wearing matronly clothes and devoting their lives to their offspring. Amy can’t accept this lifestyle, and soon she connects with Alice, a yummy mummy. Alice has lost all her baby weight, has perfectly groomed eyebrows and gets plenty of sexual attention from men. Always one for a shopping spree and makeover project, Alice takes on “Project Amy” and sets about transforming her from a wallflower into a Victoria Beckham–style mom. Once Project Amy is underway, Joe becomes distraught, claiming he wants his familiar girlfriend back. As Amy experiences a sexual reawakening, jealousy rears its head. If Joe and Amy can’t stop bickering and start communicating, their family could disintegrate. Williams, a journalist living in London, takes on many conventional themes in her first stab at fiction. Though there are some clever and endearing moments between mother and child, the bulk of the book is as appealing as reheated leftovers.
Others have handled the “new mommy” story more capably.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2007
ISBN: 1-4013-0231-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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