Outlandish and frequently hilarious.
An unlikely premise—a polar bear makes it big in Los Angeles and then crashes—but somehow Cooper (Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes, 2006, etc.) makes it work.
The book is categorized as a graphic novel, but it’s more of a novella with illustrations. Beaufort the polar bear lives at the Beaufort Sea and is separated from his mother when an ice floe breaks off due to global warming. Attracted to the glitz and glitter of Los Angeles, he hitches down to southern California and nabs a job waiting tables at the trendy restaurant Nobu. There he’s discovered by Leonardo DiCaprio and offered the role of Leo’s sidekick in the film Separation of Oil and State. The reviews are sensational, and Beaufort rides the wave of celebrity and its over-the-top lifestyle. He hooks up with supermodel Svava and starts turning down plum roles—like the polar bear in The Golden Compass 2: The Return of Whimsy—because he doesn’t want to be typecast. (To his chagrin, the role eventually goes to Bigfoot.) Beaufort starts hangin’ out with the likes of Demi and Ashton and hits the party circuit hard. His creative juices start to flow, and his ego expands, when he decides that what he really wants to do is write and direct, so he starts crafting a screenplay called Bear, a movie about the war in Iraq starring Shia LaBeouf as a Marine from Alaska “who gets called out by his bunkmates when they discover he secretly sleeps with a stuffed bear that he also totes in his pack throughout their deployment.” Unfortunately, the movie bombs, and Beaufort becomes a pariah in Tinseltown—after all, you’re only as good as your last film. In his depression and search for meaning, Beaufort turns to Scientology. Although he has a few commercial auditions—including one for Klondike Frozen Novelties—Beaufort feels his life spinning out of control, but he pulls himself together, enters a 12-step program for alcoholism and addiction and writes a one-bear show that becomes an off-Broadway hit.
Outlandish and frequently hilarious.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-935554-07-3
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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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