Amiable diversion, more Freaky Friday than Dorian Gray.
Wealthy middle-aged gay man depressed over his lost youth takes supernatural measures to swap bodies with a penniless young stud.
Still smarting over the breakup with his longtime lover Harry, 53-year-old Jack Ackerly is ready for a change. A cultured man of leisure living very comfortably off the proceeds of the sale of his advertising agency, Jack yearns for the carefree carnal existence he denied himself by not coming out until he was 30. In his desire to turn back the clock he seeks out Francesca LaBrash, a chatty witch who agrees to help him transfer his consciousness—if he can find another body willing to trade identities with him. Enter Corey, a 26-year-old sometime-waiter who Jack accidentally hits with his car. Corey, while undeniably hot, leads a life of dissipation, masking his low self-esteem and fear for his future in an endless stream of anonymous hook-ups. About to be evicted from his squalid apartment, he is exactly what Jack is looking for. Offering Corey his millions in exchange for his body, Jack and the financially desperate younger man seal the deal and Francesca works her magic. Needless to say, both men get far more than they bargained for when assuming each other’s lives. In Corey’s hard body, Jack prowls Chicago’s gay underworld making up for lost time with a wide array of one-night stands. Jack-as-Corey then sets his sites on seducing Harry, and bonds with Corey’s close friend Frida, a self-destructive young woman who needs a little tough love to turn her life around. Meanwhile, after getting past his dismay over his new body’s comparative decrepitude, Corey-as-Jack realizes that he has a chance—using Jack’s money and connections—to actually help people. Jack then starts to feel guilty for taking Corey’s youth, and rushes to reverse the spell just as Corey is struck down by a dance-related emergency in a disco. Rodi’s latest spoof (Bitch Goddess, 2001, etc.) at times reads like a commentary on the youth-centric superficiality of gay culture, but it is careful to leave a sweet aftertaste.
Amiable diversion, more Freaky Friday than Dorian Gray.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-07582-1533-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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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