An off-putting mix of stereotypes and platitudes in an unconvincing plot.
Gilmore (Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, 2008) concocts a poor-little-rich-girl story set in civil-rights–era Nashville.
The Groves are one of Nashville’s oldest, most prominent families, but under the proper gentility lurks Southern gothic dysfunction. Originally from a more modest background, Mother is a shallow, racist social climber who veers between ignoring and abusing her two daughters as she slides into alcoholism and mental illness. Father is a spineless womanizer who pays little attention to his wife and children before his suspicious but accidental death. Bezellia and her younger sister Adelaide survive their upbringing thanks mainly to their saintly black servants: live-in maid Maizelle and chauffeur-grounds man Nathaniel. In 1965, when Bezellia is 14, Nathaniel’s son Samuel comes to work with his father. Soon Bezellia and Samuel form a special friendship, but the adults separate them. In 1968 Mother won’t let Bezellia go on her high school’s trip to Paris because the chaperone is Father’s mistress. Instead Bezellia spends the summer with Mother’s parents in the country, where she becomes romantically involved with Ruddy, a farm boy whose poverty makes him unacceptable despite his musical ambitions. Anyway, it is Samuel whom Bezellia truly loves. Shortly after their one opportunity to make tender love, he leaves town for college followed by civil-rights activism and a stint in Vietnam. (Tone-deaf to the era, Gilmore has Samuel compare an Alabama sheriff to the North Vietnamese.) In 1970, Bezellia and Samuel have a brief reunion interrupted by a vicious racist attack. The years pass in newspaper articles. By 2044, Bezellia has never married despite maintaining friendships with both singing star Ruddy and Nashville mayor Samuel. She’s become a philanthropist and written a novel about the namesake ancestor she has spent her life emulating—although it is odd, given the novel’s righteous stand against racism, that the original Bezellia’s claim to fame was fighting Indians.
An off-putting mix of stereotypes and platitudes in an unconvincing plot.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-39503-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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