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THE REUNION

Name: THE REUNION
Author: Sue Walker
ISBN: 0-06-072609-1

by Sue Walker ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2004

Cuts from character to character and one year to another make for a choppy ride.

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Middling debut thriller about a group of troubled teenagers and the dark secret that stalks them after they become adults.

What awful deed took place by the shores of Loch Fyne oh-so-many years ago? Walker, a BBC investigative journalist, will remind her readers again and again that something tragic indeed happened on that outing to the Scottish Highlands in the late 1970s. The perpetrators were a group of disturbed teenagers lodged at The Unit, a mental home near Edinburgh. In the chapters set way back when, tensions among the gang are clearly ready to combust. Danny Rintoul is a child rapist. In her manic phases, pyromaniac Lydia Young explodes, threatening to torch the place. Alex Baxendale steps boldly out of the closet and launches an affair with a woman on the staff. Innes Haldane is less troubled, more treatable, and thus, by the time she’s an adult, one of the group’s better-adjusted graduates. But whatever happened in the Highlands claims its due years later, first on Innes, then on all the others. A former member of the group leaves Innes a phone message that goes unanswered. Then the caller turns up dead. Shortly after that, another group member dies, an apparent suicide. And then someone kidnaps yet another former member’s child. The author’s ’70s and present-day plot lines circle each other like jets in a drawn-out holding pattern. Like a good flight attendant, she parses out clues to her passengers and keeps promising that something big is coming. But it’s not enough to prevent riders (or readers) from growing weary. Alternating points of view and characterizations that don’t go beyond basic psychiatric diagnoses keep empathy, and thus suspense, at bay. The ending does deliver: the awful deed was indeed awful.

Cuts from character to character and one year to another make for a choppy ride.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-06-072609-1

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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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

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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.