The narrator may be unreliable, but the stories she tells, as well as her own, are infinitely appealing.
Leaton’s debut psychological thriller takes place in the fractured mind of Vivienne Coroth, who, believing herself a descendant of Faeries, may be plotting revenge against her ex-lover and his new wife.
Thanks to a court order, Vivienne can’t get anywhere near her ex, Callum, or his wife, Mary. So Vivienne starts writing a blog for Callum, hiding a password for website access in the pages of a letter she sends him. As far as Vivienne knows, Callum won’t find the password, but he’ll wish he had: Vivienne is regularly watching Mary and the couple’s twin toddler sons at the mall. She snatches one of the boys, Samuel, and spends days telling him about her Faerie family, beginning in the late 18th century—a history she knows because her ancestors’ memories have been passed on to her. But Vivienne has plans for Samuel, involving a powerful spell that she’ll soon cast. Leaton’s novel has great fun toying with perspective; the entire narrative is the blog, as Vivienne posts letters to and from Callum, as well as correspondence from Callum’s lawyers, who strongly suggest she stop writing her ex. Vivienne firmly believes that she’s a Faerie (she looks human but makes it clear she isn’t one), but Leaton avoids confirming the possibility as fact. This results in numerous bizarre, often humorous sequences in which Vivienne, for instance, converses with Samuel who, at a mere 18 months, speaks in adult-sized sentences: “The stuff about the uncles was hardly a lullaby, was it? Oh, sanitise it for me if you must. Just give me the facts about your eponymous ancestress.” There are likewise hilarious reminders of his age (he still plays with blocks), which tend to offset the seriousness of a child having been kidnapped. Vivienne recounts to Samuel a great deal of her background (mostly Faerie but some of her human family, too) and a few of her dreams; these sufficiently mold the woman’s mindset, but they’re also a bit excessive, coming across as a series of only moderately relevant short stories, each with its own title and separate chapter. Leaton steers clear of a definite resolution, leaving readers to question whether the protagonist is insane or mystical. The story leans in one direction near the end before a crackerjack finish.
The narrator may be unreliable, but the stories she tells, as well as her own, are infinitely appealing.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496012401
Page Count: 384
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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