Earning Girl Scout badges, by any means necessary, becomes a girl’s way of coping with her seriously dysfunctional family in this comedic memoir.
Beaman (Communications and Leadership/California Polytechnic University; You’re Only Young Twice, 2006) grew up desperate to win approval from her narcissistic father. Good grades, athletics, talent competitions—she strove for success in everything, and often succeeded. But Beaman’s real métier was earning Girl Scout merit badges and, by the time she was done, she needed two sashes to hold them all. This memoir structures striking moments in the author’s childhood and coming to terms with her dysfunctional family through badges won and lessons learned, reflecting throughout on the real nature of merit. The author writes with vivid energy and humor, and she knows how to turn a phrase; she describes her hospitalized father as “slowly deflating, like a basketball left too long in the garage.” She is fair to her parents, probably even diminishing their selfishness. A less resilient girl would have a different story to write. Beaman, though, is amazingly resilient, hard-working and determined, putting the kind of effort into launching a front-yard charity carnival that would do an IBM project manager proud. Big, bright humor is both shield and weapon in this memoir, a way to avoid self-pity while skewering her parents, other adults and herself. Sometimes it works, but sometimes the humor feels artificial, more interested in getting off a zinger than exploring real feelings. When her father unkindly criticizes her efforts to win a singing audition, Beaman comments “As usual, he really knows how to put a song in my heart!” Each chapter ends with a heavy-handed prepackaged lesson, as with “Making Music”: “The instrumental lesson I really learn, however, is that my life is my own composition”; Beaman often seems the same eager-beaver overachiever she was as a child, desperate to prove what she’s learned. And, though she suggests at the end that she’s moved beyond earning badges, Beaman says little about her adult self besides her achievements. An amusing memoir that would be stronger if it were more grounded in an adult perspective.
Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-1936214471
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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