A light, accessible coming-of-age story well-suited for beach and romance fans.
A novel follows a young woman in the 1960s who dates all the wrong guys as she bungles her way into adulthood.
Ali Abrams is a young college graduate whose family spends its summers on idyllic Fire Island. The clan’s tranquility is threatened by the actions of urban developer Robert Moses, who wants to commandeer the island for his own purposes. Amid this political strife, Ali struggles to find her own place in her social, family, and professional life. Ali falls hard for an older man on the island, a singer by the name of Nick Rose. Nick indulges Ali with a few dalliances, but he is clearly less than committed. Ali eventually moves on, developing relationships with one ill-suited man after another. First there is bad boy Eric London, who can’t keep his eyes from wandering, and then a long string of one-night stands and short-lived romances. After watching Ali stumble with one man after another, her friend Jordan Kaplan accuses her of acting like Scarlett O’Hara, squandering the affection of the only man who is truly devoted to her (Jordan himself). He convinces Ali to see a therapist to deal with her self-destructive behavior. The therapist persuades Ali to take a hiatus from her fruitless dating and focus on herself and her burgeoning advertising career. As she travels between Park Avenue and Fire Island, Manhattan offices and island cocktail parties, the reader can only hope that Ali will get out of her own way and attain personal happiness. The book delivers plenty of vibrant historical details about Fire Island, Manhattan, New York City socialites, and the ad industry of the ’60s. At one point, Ali rhapsodizes about the Rainbow Room (“Breathtaking. Magical. Sophisticated. Art deco. Big band orchestra live, revolving dance floor, wraparound views of the glittering skyline, the Hudson, the Statue of Liberty. It defined elegance and romance right out of a Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers movie”). But Israelson’s (co-author of Lovesick: The Marilyn Syndrome, 1991, etc.) tale is as much about one woman’s personal journey as it is about the pressure to be desirable, to find love, and to conform to society’s expectations. Although Ali’s poor choices start to feel repetitive and frustrating as the story progresses, the accessible prose should keep readers turning pages in the anticipation that Ali will finally find fulfillment.
A light, accessible coming-of-age story well-suited for beach and romance fans.Pub Date: July 20, 2017
ISBN: 9780999004302
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 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
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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