A formulaic allegory.
A young heiress, carrying out her mother’s deathbed wish, searches for her twin sister.
Özkan’s heroine, Diana, scion of a wealthy Rio de Janiero family of hoteliers, was named after the Roman goddess of the hunt. Twenty-four years ago, her beloved mother tells her, Diana’s father left, taking with him Diana’s twin, Mary, who was named after the Virgin. Before she dies, Diana’s mother instructs her to find Mary and gives her four envelopes containing letters from her sister. Diana does not really wish to embark on this quest. Her life has become a round of drinking with shallow friends, who fawn over her and call her Goddess. Bored with the gifts and accolades she receives every day, Diana goes walking in a seaside park, where a mischievous old beggar hints that Mary is actually very close to her. An artist, Mathias, captures her attention, and he thinks Diana is his soul mate. He can only be sure if he leaves Rio after their coffee date. (This is one of many pseudo-mystical koans seeded throughout.) When Mary’s letters reveal that, like St. Exupery’s Little Prince, she left her comfortable surroundings to take “responsibility for a rose,” Diana resolves to alter her own life. She’s off to Istanbul where Zeynep Hanim, a wise woman who inhabits a mysterious garden, promises to teach her, just as she had taught Mary before her, how to listen to roses. After Zeynep imparts contradictory advice, e.g., always be on time, but don’t hesitate to knock after midnight, Diana is ready for enlightenment. Soon, she’s listening raptly as two roses named Artemis (Greek counterpart of Diana) and Miriam debate the true meaning of holiness. But not until she returns to Rio will Diana solve the puzzle of Mary’s whereabouts. The message—that definition by others is no match for self-realization—is obvious. However, in failing to depict the depths of Diana’s pre-enlightened existence, Özkan minimizes the stakes that any novel of redemption requires.
A formulaic allegory.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-16230-5
Page Count: 242
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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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