NUMBER 10

Name: NUMBER 10
Author: Sue Townsend
ISBN: 1-56947-349-8

by Sue Townsend ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2003

Townsend (Adrian Mole, 2000, etc.) has a rare gift for wickedly funny one-liners—and her lighthearted affection for human...

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The Prime Minister is out of touch with modern life, and the hyenas of the British press are having a field day with his numerous gaffes.

Edward Clare doesn’t even know the price of a pint of milk, and that’s the least of it. Time he got out in the real world, eh? And so he does, disguised in his wife’s clothes, accompanied by the doughty policeman named Jack Sprat, who usually keeps watch at the door of Number 10 Downing Street and now must guard the bewigged, bespangled, and happily effeminate PM. His wife Adele, an eccentric genius on maintenance lithium, doesn’t even notice that he’s gone. She has Very Important Things to worry about: for one, whether or not to arrange for the burial of the amputated leg that her housekeeper’s son mangled in a motorcycle accident. And if this chunk of flesh is entitled to a funeral, what about warts? How many would it take to fill an average coffin? Alerted by delighted reporters, a Third World mathematician kindly provides the answer before Adele loses her mind entirely. Back to Edward: en route to Edinburgh on a very late and overcrowded train, he/she gets to mingle with real people at last—everyone from a bitchy female entrepreneur glued to a cell phone and trying to sell chicken eyeballs to the Middle East, to struggling inhabitants of council housing, out-of-luck but scrappy blokes with names like Coughing Tony and Polio John. Their zigzagging odyssey proceeds at breakneck pace and eventually brings all full circle back to London—but not before Jack has fallen in love with Edward’s sister Pamela and rescued his mother and her molting budgie from a crack dealer with apocalyptic dreams of glory.

Townsend (Adrian Mole, 2000, etc.) has a rare gift for wickedly funny one-liners—and her lighthearted affection for human foibles and foolishness keeps this spot-on satire from becoming too brittle.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003

ISBN: 1-56947-349-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Soho

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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ADRIAN MOLE AND THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
by Sue Townsend

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ADRIAN MOLE
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GHOST CHILDREN
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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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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.