Unmemorable.
In a North Carolina mountain hamlet, the renovation of a crumbling mansion reveals unsettling secrets.
Paxton Osgood, pampered daughter of one of Walls of Water, N.C.’s, wealthiest families, is planning a gala to mark the 75th anniversary of the Women’s Society Club, founded by her grandmother Agatha. The invitations go awry due to a freak storm, which is a harbinger that dark forces still lurk at the gala site, the Blue Ridge Madam manor, once owned by lumber barons, the Jacksons, who lost their money when their logging grounds were turned into a national forest. The house, deemed haunted, was abandoned for decades until salvaged by the Osgoods, who plan on converting it to a bed and breakfast. Paxton’s brother Colin has returned from his world travels to landscape the grounds, but when a gnarled peach tree is uprooted to make way for a statelier transplant tree, a skull is found in the crater. Local shopkeeper Willa Jackson, whose grandmother Georgie was 17 when the Jacksons fell from grace, declines her invitation to the gala—her ancestral memories have made her hostile to Walls of Water’s affluent residents, and too many people recall that, in high school, she was a prankster whose antics were blamed on Colin. The skull undoubtedly belonged to Tucker Devlin, a charismatic, need we say devilish grifter who came to town in 1936, instantly captivating all resident females with predictably dire results. Devlin concentrated his blandishments on the Jacksons, persuading them to invest their last dollars in an ill-advised peach orchard at an altitude unconducive to fruit. Georgie now occupies the same nursing home as her former best friend Agatha, but only Agatha is still of sound mind: She reveals that she formed the Women's Society Club not for philanthropic purposes but to reckon with Tucker. Discordant notes of magic realism at times distract from what is essentially a benign tale of spunky Southern women finding true love after overcoming not-very-significant challenges.
Unmemorable.Pub Date: March 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-553-80722-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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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