A sweetly affirming debut novel describing one woman’s long journey to autonomy via Spain, Cuba, and the US. The saga (which serves as an unobtrusive reprise of recent Spanish and Cuban history) opens in Cuba shortly after Castro has taken over. There, Rosa Garach (living with eldest son Andres, daughter-in law Norma, and 11-year-old grandson Juan Andres) sees her grandson taken off by the security police because his parents— counterrevolutionary activities have been discovered. We then flash back to Spain, where Rosa (born in 1900) marries Juan, an ambitious farmer, and bears four sons (Andres, twins Lucas and Fermin, and Jose) and daughter Lucia. Juan abuses the illiterate Rosa simply because she’s a woman (and thus inferior), but he has big dreams for himself and his sons. The boys soon move to Cuba, where opportunities in the late ’20s and early ’40s are better. They—re joined there by Rosa and Juan, but not for long—as Juan, concerned with Cuba’s growing political instability, decides that the family should return to Spain. A fatal decision, it turns out, since civil war soon breaks out. But the four sons first, then Lucia, and finally Rosa (once Juan dies of cancer) all make it back to Cuba. They prosper until the Revolution, when they must again flee, this time to the States. As her children move about, marry, and quarrel, Rosa—always the loving mother—worries that her sons (particularly Lucas) don—t respect her not only because she’s a woman but because she’s an uneducated one at that. In her 90s, though, with help from Lucas’s former mistress Cachita Montero, Rosa finally gets the money due her, buys a house, and learns to write and read. A birthday at the close will at last bring everybody together to acknowledge her tenacity and hard work. An unpretentious feminist tale of love and determination, refreshingly unsentimental.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55885-247-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Arte Público
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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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