An often fresh take on the collegiate anti-war movement in small-town America.
In this debut novel, a college student on a U.S. Army nursing scholarship joins the anti–Vietnam War movement.
It’s Sept. 15, 1969, the day after Judy Talton’s 19th birthday and the day that she decides to change her path. At Central Illinois University’s student union, she sits with the radical students for the first time. After an argument between anti-war protest leader David and the ROTC kids, Judy is approached by Vida, who says she’s been watching her hanging out on the group’s fringes. Other members of the radical group emerge, including Wil, whose birthday is also Sept. 14 (which becomes important later). The group is pushing a petition supporting anti-war political-science professor Swanson, who’s in jeopardy of losing his job. There’s also anxiety about the upcoming draft lottery, which is scheduled to happen right after Thanksgiving. Instantly, Judy is swept up in the movement and takes part in the “Moratorium” event (a national day of protest against the war) and then a march in Washington, D.C. But through it all, Judy tries to keep a low profile, as protesting the war could result in her having to pay the Army back for her scholarship; she also goes to great pains to keep her Army connection a secret from her new friends. The conflict intensifies throughout the novel, particularly when Judy decides to go to Washington, which makes her AWOL: a criminal offense. Throughout, the author does a fine job of complicating and building Judy’s dilemma. The divide between Judy’s old life and her new one continues to cause her angst, which ramps up the tension regarding her various choices. What isn’t made clear, however, is why Judy initially decides to risk her scholarship, which she very much needs, in order to join the radical group. This is a symptom of a larger issue, which is the fact that Judy’s motivations are unclear, even to Judy—which, in turn, may make it difficult for readers to understand her. Still, she makes a sacrifice in a finale that’s well-crafted, surprising, and inevitable.
An often fresh take on the collegiate anti-war movement in small-town America.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-453-0
Page Count: 377
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 27, 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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