Who has the patience for a hero this cloying and self-important, or for plot turns this clunky?
Stolen art, Nazi collaborators in WWII rural France and a larger-than-life guitar-twanging American named Coyote add up to no more than lukewarm melodrama in British romance novelist Montefiore’s second to appear in the U.S. (after Last Voyage of the Valentina, 2006).
In 1985, Manhattan antiques-dealer Misha is shocked to discover that his beloved dying mother, Anouk, possesses a Titian masterpiece when she tries to donate it to the Met, which cannot authenticate the painting’s rightful owner. When Misha’s stepfather Coyote, who abandoned Misha and Anouk 30 years earlier, shows up, Misha turns the aging homeless man away. Immediately full of questions and regret, Misha then sets out to solve the mystery of the painting and to uncover the truth about his own history. He returns to the village in Bordeaux that he and Anouk left when Misha was seven. Until the war, Anouk had been the nanny at a privately owned winery/estate. After the war, the villagers denounced Anouk as a traitor for marrying Misha’s father, a German officer. Witnessing her brutal humiliation caused Misha to become mute. Anouk continued to work at the estate, now a hotel, until the handsome American Coyote arrived. While Anouk and Coyote fell in love, his affectionate attention gave Misha back his voice. Coyote brought them to New Jersey, where they lived happily until Coyote disappeared. In Bordeaux, Misha learns that, despite appearances, both his mother and father were anti-Nazis and that Coyote had not abandoned Misha and Anouk; he’d been in prison for murder. A mama’s boy who has never connected intimately with any other woman despite numerous gratuitous, uninspired sex scenes, Misha finds true love with Claudine, whom he first loved when he was six and who now leaves her husband to return with Misha to America. The million-dollar painting becomes largely irrelevant.
Who has the patience for a hero this cloying and self-important, or for plot turns this clunky?Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-7889-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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