Laugh-out-loud one-liners ensure that even the uninitiated will enjoy Adrian Mole’s journey through Townsend’s cruel, comic...
Loveable loser Adrian Mole turns 35 in the latest installment in the British series.
Townsend began tracking Adrian’s wholly mediocre life in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ (1982). Set between 2002 and 2004, this, like the others, takes the form of diary entries. Here a slightly more responsible Adrian emerges. Despite a few setbacks—his cooking show, Offally Good!, has been cancelled, and youngest son William has gone to live with his mum in Nigeria—he’s finally moved out of his parents’ house. Adrian has bought a posh loft at Rat Wharf and some dangerously white furniture to go with it. He is doing well as an assistant to an antiquarian bookseller and may even have found a remedy for the unrequited love of his life, Pandora Braithwaite, in the form of Miss Marigold Flowers. But happy times have short tenancy—in fact, just a few days. Adrian’s initial attraction to Marigold’s fragility disappears when he’s nearly bored to death during a long tour of her doll houses. But no matter: Marigold tells everyone they’re engaged and Adrian seems helpless to contradict her. Likewise, life at Rat Wharf turns out to be less than ideal when the picturesque canal swans begin menacing Adrian, and his upstairs neighbor complains at the noise made when Adrian boils water. Finally, Adrian’s credit-card debt is mounting, thanks in part to his “resourcefulness” in taking cash advances on newly offered cards to pay the minimum on others. Things get worse: Marigold says she is pregnant and sets a wedding date, Adrian begins a torrid affair with her sister Daisy and his son Glenn is stationed in Iraq. With her usual dark wit, Townsend skewers the Blair government’s search for WMDs, the pervasive hell of modern debt and the everyman’s inability to master love.
Laugh-out-loud one-liners ensure that even the uninitiated will enjoy Adrian Mole’s journey through Townsend’s cruel, comic world.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-56947-406-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
Thoroughbreds and Virginia blue-bloods cavort, commit murder, and fall in love in Roberts's (Hidden Riches, 1994, etc.) latest romantic thriller — this one set in the world of championship horse racing. Rich, sheltered Kelsey Byden is recovering from a recent divorce when she receives a letter from her mother, Naomi, a woman she has believed dead for over 20 years. When Kelsey confronts her genteel English professor father, though, he sheepishly confesses that, no, her mother isn't dead; throughout Kelsey's childhood, she was doing time for the murder of her lover. Kelsey meets with Naomi and not only finds her quite charming, but the owner of Three Willows, one of the most splendid horse farms in Virginia. Kelsey is further intrigued when she meets Gabe Slater, a blue-eyed gambling man who owns a neighboring horse farm; when one of Gabe's horses is mated with Naomi's, nostrils flare, flanks quiver, and the romance is on. Since both Naomi and Gabe have horses entered in the Kentucky Derby, Kelsey is soon swept into the whirlwind of the Triple Crown, in spite of her family's objections to her reconciliation with the notorious Naomi. The rivalry between the two horse farms remains friendly, but other competitors — one of them is Gabe's father, a vicious alcoholic who resents his son's success — prove less scrupulous. Bodies, horse and human, start piling up, just as Kelsey decides to investigate the murky details of her mother's crime. Is it possible she was framed? The ground is thick with no-goods, including haughty patricians, disgruntled grooms, and jockeys with tragic pasts, but despite all the distractions, the identity of the true culprit behind the mayhem — past and present — remains fairly obvious. The plot lopes rather than races to the finish. Gambling metaphors abound, and sexual doings have a distinctly equine tone. But Roberts's style has a fresh, contemporary snap that gets the story past its own worst excesses.
Pub Date: June 13, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14059-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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