A small gem of a novel.
A perfectly charming debut in which a septuagenarian from Liverpool travels to Long Island in search of her long-lost fiancé.
Daisy Phillips is feeling the pressure to move from her quaint English home to a state-of-the-art retirement community. She loves her house, but since her husband’s death eldest son Dennis has been taking care of things, and now that he’s moving hours from Liverpool, he wants her to follow (and so does his young wife, who wants the cash from the sale of Daisy’s house). She engages in a few harrowing (though successful) attempts at home repair, which steel her resolve to stay put; furthermore Daisy decides to travel again. Rooting through some boxes she finds a relic from her past—a watch given (in lieu of a ring) to her by Michael Baker, an American soldier she fell in love with during World War II. He was to return for her, but his letters stopped abruptly, and then life went on. Daisy decides to travel to America and locate Michael, or at least his descendants, to return the watch (made additionally special as it is inscribed by Arthur Rubinstein, Michael’s piano teacher). She contacts American cousins she’s never met, and soon she is in Long Island, immersed in their family intrigues. Staying with her second cousin Elisabeth and her brood of sons, Daisy gets a firsthand glimpse at the impossibly overscheduled lives of affluent Americans. Elisabeth barely has a moment to breathe while worrying about teenage son Michael, and her husband Richard, who she fears is Dart Man, a menace who has been shooting darts into the behinds of Manhattan’s women. Meanwhile, young Michael is helping Daisy search for her missing G.I., and with the help of 92-year-old Hulda Kheist (a rascal in a novel of wonderfully drawn characters), who still lives in the building Michael wrote from in 1945, they make it to New Hampshire, where Michael was last seen. Unabashedly tender, the cinematic quality of the prose—composed mostly of short, fragmented sentences—prevents the story from becoming sentimental.
A small gem of a novel.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-46440-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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
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.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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