In Schinnow’s novel, a young farmer is willing to risk everything he loves in an attempt to save it.
Frederick Heinold’s mother died when he was 9 years old. Because of the loss, he bonded closely with his father, Emmett, resulting in a passion for farming that laid the framework of his life. Though he had always admired his father, he hadn’t realized what a consummate farmer Emmett was until 10 years after his death, when Frederick faces difficult challenges and has few resources to alter the bleakness of his future. He overextends himself purchasing expensive equipment and renting additional acres to farm in hopes of winning back the respect of his wife, Joann, whom he married five years earlier. Joann is a city girl, and though she initially loved Frederick for his common sense, she soon resents the hardships of farm life. She begins to travel daily to Lime City, sometimes staying overnight with her mother and eventually finding a job as a real estate agent. Two men strongly challenge their marriage: Eldon Mathews, a neighbor Joann admires for being a highly successful farmer (whom Frederick remembers as the school bully and who now wants his land), and Miles Richards, a handsome con man who quickly seduces his way into Joann’s bed and then into her savings. Set in rural Iowa, debut author Schinnow’s novel successfully captures the mood of the 1970s directly before the farming crisis, the outcome of which was the consolidation of land and the specialized farming of corn and soybean. Schinnow exposes the recklessness of the new generation of farmers for whom debt is common and the tenet “tried and true” no longer holds value. Though many of Frederick’s neighbors are affected, Frederick becomes lost as he searches to redefine himself. As Schinnow poetically writes: “His arms sculled back and forth like insufficient wings. He was flying over a land that lay far below. If he faltered, he would sink in a languid, spiral (sic) until he touched down like an exquisite ballerina. Would his memories follow? It would be nice not to remember.”
A cautionary tale of broken dreams and lives gone awry.
Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615601991
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Shell Rock River Press
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2014
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
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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