Mediocre, but with the author’s track record and a pre-Christmas release, how can it fail?
Megaseller Brown (Smash Cut, 2009, etc.) tries her hand at historical fiction in this slight tale of a Depression-era landlady and her mysterious boarder.
Gilead, Texas—1934, population 5,000, if you don’t count the unfortunates inhabiting the shantytown on the city limits—is reeling from the ravages of the crash and the drought, but Ella Barron’s boarding house is an enclave of efficient domesticity. With the help of her black maid Margaret, Ella serves three squares a day, handles arduous Monday washdays and keeps an impeccable house for her tenants, a travelling salesman and two spinsters. Her husband skipped town some time ago, and Ella’s ten-year-old son Solly is given to strange compulsions and fits that their family physician, Dr. Kincaid, can’t diagnose. (Autism-spectrum disorders were then unknown.) Into Ella’s regimented life comes Mr. Rainwater, Kincaid’s cancer-stricken distant cousin. A prosperous former cotton broker, lanky, handsome Rainwater has decided to spend his final weeks at Ella’s boardinghouse. Despite his moribund condition and bouts of severe pain, he is a quixotic social activist. Drought-impoverished cattle farmers are being forced to sell their starving herds to a government program that dispatches the cattle on site, burying the emaciated carcasses in huge ditches. When ranchers allow Shantytown residents to scavenge the ditches for meat, a gang led by town bully Conrad Ellis, whose family meatpacking business is threatened, terrorizes scavengers and ranchers alike. Conrad is only temporarily deterred by the group resistance organized by Rainwater; an eventual showdown between the two is as inevitable as the romance between Ella and Rainwater, who moves her by seeing the savant in Solly where others see only idiocy. Despite Brown’s earnest dramatization of the era’s horrors, including racial prejudice, lynching, homelessness and hunger, the novel never achieves the pathos she aims for. Her characters are simply too wooden, her Depression too much like a sepia-tinted souvenir photo.
Mediocre, but with the author’s track record and a pre-Christmas release, how can it fail?Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-7277-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Hannah, after eight paperbacks, abandons her successful time-travelers for a hardcover life of kitchen-sink romance. Everyone must have got the Olympic Peninsula memo for this spring because, as of this reading, authors Hannah, Nora Roberts, and JoAnn Ross have all placed their newest romances in or near the Quinault rain forest. Here, 40ish Annie Colwater, returns to Washington State after her husband, high-powered Los Angeles lawyer Blake, tells her he’s found another (younger) woman and wants a divorce. Although a Stanford graduate, Annie has known only a life of perfect wifedom: matching Blake’s ties to his suits and cooking meals from Gourmet magazine. What is she to do with her shattered life? Well, she returns to dad’s house in the small town of Mystic, cuts off all her hair (for a different look), and goes to work as a nanny for lawman Nick Delacroix, whose wife has committed suicide, whose young daughter Izzy refuses to speak, and who himself has descended into despair and alcoholism. Annie spruces up Nick’s home on Mystic Lake and sends “Izzy-bear” back into speech mode. And, after Nick begins attending AA meetings, she and he become lovers. Still, when Annie learns that she’s pregnant not with Nick’s but with Blake’s child, she heads back to her empty life in the Malibu Colony. The baby arrives prematurely, and mean-spirited Blake doesn’t even stick around to support his wife. At this point, it’s perfectly clear to Annie—and the reader—that she’s justified in taking her newborn daughter and driving back north. Hannah’s characters indulge in so many stages of the weeps, from glassy eyes to flat-out sobs, that tear ducts are almost bound to stay dry. (First printing of 100,000; first serial to Good Housekeeping; Literary Guild/Doubleday book club selections)
Pub Date: March 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-609-60249-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
