A crime tale featuring a protagonist whose desire for normalcy makes him sympathetic and appealing.
In LeBlanc’s debut crime novel, a young Canadian can’t escape the gangster life after fleeing to America, where he continues to attract Mafioso types.
Jean Paul Comeau’s teenage years in Kensington, Canada, are rife with crime. His best friend, Armstrong, leads him and others in a gang, but Jean Paul prefers academics to illicit activities. A blood oath keeps him loyal, however, and he even becomes the group’s accountant. But when a motorcycle gang thinks that Jean Paul stole something from them, he takes refuge in New York City with his uncle. Jean Paul works blue-collar jobs and makes a stop in New Jersey to visit Debbie, a girl he’d fallen for back in Canada. Debbie’s dad, Mr. Mancini, gets Jean Paul better work, but soon it’s markedly clear that the “errands” he has the young man running are for the benefit of the mob. Despite all the criminal activity, however, the plot focuses on more emotional, dramatic elements: Jean Paul buys groceries for his mother and little sisters, as his father’s excessive drinking has rendered the cupboards bare; he befriends an American bookstore owner, Martin, who assigns him reading material for later discussion; and he cherishes summers in Gondola Point in Canada, away from the crime-ridden projects where he lives. The book opens with gangsters’ violent attacks as they search for Jean Paul, and LeBlanc tells the first half of the story in flashback, building readers’ anticipation until the incident that puts Jean Paul in the cross hairs. Jean Paul seems to believe that he can leave his criminal past behind, although he misses the irony that his acceptance into the Mancini family has tied him to another “Family.” But LeBlanc makes his protagonist’s inability to break free from gangsters credible and shows how the boy’s own thuggish behavior, such as beating up a high school boy for spreading lies about Debbie, stems from his father’s prior abuse. Conversely, Jean Paul’s relationship with Debbie is less convincing; he rarely expresses his feelings for her, even to himself, and although he speaks rather eloquently with Martin, he sums up his romance with the phrase: “Wow. It’s been bitchin’. I mean, really, really great.”
A crime tale featuring a protagonist whose desire for normalcy makes him sympathetic and appealing.Pub Date: June 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491735121
Page Count: 396
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 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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