HENRIETTA SNOW

Name: HENRIETTA SNOW
Author: Ruth Doan MacDougall
ISBN: 0-9663352-4-4

by Ruth Doan MacDougall ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2004

Perhaps best suited for already established fans, but there's also enough poignancy and universality to make an impression...

bookshelf

The latest chronicle of the ongoing adventures of high-school friends now in their 50s, last heard from in Snowy (2002).

Title heroine Snowy is trying to make a fresh start after dealing with bankruptcy and her husband's recent suicide. Weakened by writer's block and a bout of agoraphobia, she is hardly the social butterfly she once was as a popular cheerleader in high school. Often consumed by memories of those days, she spends much of her time reminiscing with old friends and even rekindling a relationship with Tom, a former Gunthwaite High sweetheart. MacDougall does a fine job showing her aging characters trying (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) to live up to their former youthful fabulousness, under the strain of arthritis and extra weight, the temptation of eternal youth through plastic surgery, thinking you know someone and having them surprise you. With time and a little help from her friends, Snowy eventually emerges and slowly rediscovers the joys of traveling and hiking through the mountains of New Hampshire, with lots of chat and good grub along the way. A traumatic incident involving a man with some dynamite shocks her from her writer's block, and for a while it almost seems like all is well–including the fitting high-school reunion finale, during which the friends gather and bask in their old glory. While the story stands well enough on its own, the constant dredging of teenage memories becomes tiresome, as does Snowy's daughter Ruhamah falling in and out of love with mostly the sons of Snowy's friends. MacDougall often resorts to long streams of exposition in order to fill the reader in on events past, but she atones with lively dialogue and adorable protagonists.

Perhaps best suited for already established fans, but there's also enough poignancy and universality to make an impression on those meeting these characters for the first time.

Pub Date: April 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-9663352-4-4

Page Count: -

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

bookshelf

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...

bookshelf

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

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

bookshelf

LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

bookshelf

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.