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WINTER'S TALES

Name: WINTER'S TALES
Author: Robin Baird-Smith
ISBN: 0-312-08922-8

NEW SERIES VIII

edited by Robin Baird-Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 17, 1993

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The eighth edition of this annual anthology is still cosmopolitan but also slighter and more meta-literary than previously. As before, however, the assortment of writers, mostly British, consists of the well-known as well as the relatively new. Muriel Spark offers ``The Girl I Left Behind Me,'' a sketch about a woman who lives in a boardinghouse and has a drudge of a job—the piece finishes with an abrupt surreal bang—and Chaim Potok's ``The Seven of the Address'' is a penetrating story about an old writer who has ``lost her way'': she journeys to a ``cell- like'' room in Israel to find her direction again by moving into mysticism. As almost always in Winter's Tales, Laura Kalpakian also puts in an appearance—here with ``Swann Song,'' a long, zany satire of a conglomerate that takes over a newspaper and of the fired journalists who fight back and win the day. Of the other pieces here: ``Sister Monica's Last Journey,'' by Richard Austin, tells of the odd journey of a dead nun to her resting place; ``Another Kind of Cinderella,'' by Angela Huth, subtly chronicles the travails of a violinist henpecked by his aging mother and lovelorn over a lesbian musician; ``The Death of Daffy Duck,'' by Peter Goldworthy, is about the decline of a friendship between two couples after one of the men chokes on his food and the other saves him. These are all good solid efforts, but the standouts are Will Self's ``The Indian Mutiny,'' about grade-school boys who force a teacher into a breakdown, and Monica Furlong's ``Carla, Cara,'' set in 1939, about Franz, an ÇmigrÇ for whom Carla, a sort of Lady Brett Ashley in miniature, is a ``talisman warding off terror and grief and hatred and loss''—until she turns on him. Like the others, the general quality of these never-before- published stories is still high.

Pub Date: May 17, 1993

ISBN: 0-312-08922-8

Page Count: 256

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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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.