Earnest but deeply flawed, and saccharine when it’s not overstuffed.
March (Catbird, 2006, etc.) shows a Southern teenager getting a few lessons in tolerance after he’s caught vandalizing a synagogue.
Jesse Terrill has a few good reasons to be mad. His mother skipped out of Pottstown years before, his brother in the Marines was killed in a terrorist attack and his father has been living in a mental hospital ever since a violent assault. Though he has a stable home life with his uncle G.T., Jesse’s default mode is anger and confusion. And he’s got company: three buddies who join him late at night—“one of those nights when you want to tear something up”—to drink wine and smoke dope, then break into the B’nai Shalom Synagogue and wreck the place. Jesse is caught and, after withstanding the congregation’s withering glares in court, is put on probation and assigned to perform community service at a retirement home. His chief job is to mind Mendel Ebban, a Holocaust survivor who was forced to prepare bodies for burning in the ovens at Treblinka. Unsurprisingly, much learning ensues. Mendel finally has somebody to get him out of his room, and Jesse gets to pick up some knowledge about shofars, the Warsaw ghetto and Passover. His Talmudic education occurs at the same time that he runs afoul of a former biker-gang leader and gets a lead on the identity of the man who assaulted his father. March’s efforts to craft a commentary about vengeance and forgiveness are consistently strained. Mendel is too bogged down by back story and pedagogy to be a full-blooded character, cookie-cutter thugs and cops shadow Jesse at every turn and a contrived romantic subplot adds little. Worst of all, the author never seems to have a solid grip on Jesse, whose attitudes and reactions shift mainly to serve the plot: One moment he’s referring to a yarmulke as a “goofy hat,” a few pages later he’s musing thoughtfully on the Book of Ruth.
Earnest but deeply flawed, and saccharine when it’s not overstuffed.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-57962-185-8
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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