Skillful work about a friendship between two ultimately likable guys. But the movie will need zingers—the dialogue here is...
A fresh take on an evergreen: two men—one just divorced, one about to marry—spend a week together testing, then tying up, the bonds of their friendship.
Credit screenwriter Pickett for coming up with a debut that goes some distance before readers realize they’re on the road again in another buddy story (this one bought prepublication by Fox Searchlight Pictures). Pickett’s narrator, Miles Raymond, enlists sympathy and interest as a man riven by divorce, a writer shaken by rejections, and a wine expert sodden from too much hands-on research. Raymond’s bemused, literate observations make his account of a week spent with his friend Jack funny and perceptive. Miles and Jack, who’s about to marry, head out to celebrate Jack’s final week of bachelorhood in California’s Santa Ynez wine country. A handsome, seductive actor, Jack wants—surprise!—to spend this last week of freedom in sexual debauchery. Sensitive Miles tries to restrain him, but it’s useless—Jack and a comely blond go off and make bedroom noise. Miles isn’t alone: he’s met a woman who’s attracted to him, but he holds back, pondering the eternals: Would marriages survive if wives let their overcharged husbands fool around? Can friendships, marriages, and, yes, love itself, endure? Before matters turn ponderous, Miles and Jack decide to go hunting for wild boar with a kid they meet in a bar. The hunting scene and then another tryst between Jack and a zaftig waitress edge matters into the realm of slapstick and bedroom farce (movies are about action, after all). The week over, Jack heads to the altar with a broken nose and rib, while Miles decides to take Jack’s advice and make a date with the woman he met in wine country.
Skillful work about a friendship between two ultimately likable guys. But the movie will need zingers—the dialogue here is only adequate.Pub Date: June 16, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-32466-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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