A moving social saga of compassion and connection.
An unlikely friendship forms between a married couple and a disabled veteran in this debut novel.
George and Alexia Demas are middle-aged idealists living in Chicago’s Wicker Park. George is a liberal-minded curmudgeon whose belief in the dignity of the common man makes him willing to go head-to-head with the system, while Alexia’s do-gooder ethos is rooted in her Greek Orthodox faith: “For I was homeless and you gave Me shelter.” They are asked to prove their generosity when Jesus “Gato” Cárdenas, a homeless Cuban émigré and Vietnam vet, enters their lives in need of help. Gato’s Supplemental Security Income has been suspended due to the misconception that Jesus Cárdenas is dead, forcing him out on the street. The Demases agree to become Gato’s payees—to receive his SSI checks on his behalf—and to house him temporarily, despite their reservations. An odd sense of family develops between Gato and the Demases, whom the vet refers to as “Dadi” and “Mami” despite the fact that they are younger than he is. But there are more secrets to the alcoholic, gangland-fluent Gato than meet the eye, and as the Demases become further enmeshed in the life of their new ward, they learn that the misconception surrounding Jesus’ death may not be entirely false. Cole writes in a conversational prose that morphs as the narration alternates among the three protagonists. The chapters read like memoirs: “Our real fear was losing our privacy,” recalls George, “losing our ability to relax in our own home, losing the relative sanity of our lives to the craziness of his.” The plot treks ambitiously into territory rarely covered in fiction, exploring the liminal space between assisted living and homelessness that so many disabled people occupy. The novel successfully evokes the frustrations and rewards that come with trying to help a stranger in a way that is both affecting and educational. Gato’s dialect-heavy narration can induce winces at times, and there is a light Christian undertone to the story that may put off some readers. Even so, Cole digs deep into his subjects to craft a satisfying modern morality tale.
A moving social saga of compassion and connection.Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63505-056-1
Page Count: 312
Publisher: North Loop Books
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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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