A derivative vampire tale about a late-in-life romance
A debut novella tells the story of a widow who falls in love with a vampire.
Fifty-nine-year-old Jasmine hasn’t sought out romance since the death of her husband. Rather, she’s lived a quiet life as a surgical nurse and accepted—reluctantly—that her physical desirability will continue to decline with age. Soon after her retirement, she introduces herself to the mysterious guy who has moved in across the street—a man who seems to react very poorly to sunlight. He has a secret to share with her, though he warns that she must be open-minded: “He confessed to me that he was a vampire: the undead, if it were to be known, and that he had lived for centuries.” Jasmine quickly becomes infatuated with the vampire, Baron, going so far as to devise a scheme involving transfusion blood (“I mentioned that I could still visit people I knew in the hospital where I had worked, and may be able to get hold of a bottle”). In return, Baron shows Jasmine the ways of vampire life and society, including his extended family and the dangers posed by hunters of the undead. When Baron proposes making Jasmine his bride, she must weigh the advantages—wealth, companionship, everlasting life—against the tricky morals of having to kill people in order to survive. Bertrand writes in a delightfully direct, plainspoken prose, telling most of her story as exposition: “I asked him if vampires could fall in love, and he said that he once had a great love, but he could not accept the way she mutilated bodies.” But the rarity of true scenes and dialogue keeps readers at a distance from the characters, as does a lack of substantial interiority or emotional depth. Jasmine accepts Baron’s lifestyle with so little reservation that readers will wonder about her sanity and ethics, but she lacks the sort of character complexity that would allow these issues to be properly explored. The tropes and boundaries of the vampire genre have been flipped and redrawn many times over in the past decade, and in such a context, Bertrand’s take feels underwhelming. The book wraps up quickly at only 104 pages, though a cliffhanger ending suggests a sequel.
A derivative vampire tale about a late-in-life romancePub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5255-0857-8
Page Count: 72
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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