An uninspiring rags-to-riches tale set in modern New York City.
The next chapter of Samantha Bonti’s life unfolds in this sophomore effort from Corso (Brooklyn Story, 2010).
Samantha thinks her life will finally begin when her abusive mob boyfriend is locked up and she meets with a publisher to discuss the memoir she’s written about dating him. But the ex-boyfriend makes some calls from jail and ruins her authorial prospects. Now, Samantha is living a solitary life in Brooklyn, working as an assistant in Manhattan and still dreaming of publishing her book. When she meets Alec DeMarco on the street one morning, she believes he’s her ticket to a posher, more secure life. He gets her attention by grabbing her shoulder and spinning her around (before telling her how beautiful she is, of course). Alec wines and dines Samantha, taking her through a whirlwind, no-expenses-spared courtship before proposing to her two months later. While unsure of many aspects of life with Alec, she agrees to marry him. For the next 10 or so years, she acts the role of Wall Street wife and mother while power-obsessed Alec becomes distant, drug-reliant, and emotionally, eventually physically, abusive. Samantha constantly prays on her rosary beads for greater peace and stability in her home life and dreams of the freedom she could attain by publishing her book, but for most of this novel, praying and dreaming are the full extent of her efforts. A more passive character would be hard to find. Entering into an abusive relationship might make sense for a character whose past consists of a string of abusive relationships, and obscene riches have been known to hypnotize many, but Corso is unable to reveal a deeper inner life for her heroine. She (and Samantha) seem to take more delight in descriptions of wealth or the corruption of Wall Street.
An uninspiring rags-to-riches tale set in modern New York City.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9818-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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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