An arresting novel that grounds its story first before spinning readers off into a rewarding, dreamlike finale.
In Alexander’s (The Fall of Summer, 2014) psychological thriller, a woman undergoing hypnotherapy has trouble distinguishing reality from visions of what seems to be another life.
Jane McBride’s trek into past-life regression therapy seems to be going well. She apparently experiences a “previous lifetime” when under hypnosis, seeing herself as a nun. But therapist Twyla refuses further sessions with Jane, who’s been increasingly unresponsive and harder to pull out of her hypnotic state. Unfortunately, real life for Jane involves philandering, alcoholic husband Jimmy and sexually harassing boss John Briggs at cosmetics company DSRR. She prefers the regression, where she feels love for a man she recurrently sees. Jane tries self-hypnosis, and soon the regressions bleed into her dreams and waking state, leaving her baffled as to what her reality truly is. In spite of the plot, the author doesn’t relay the story as a twisted, illusory narrative. It’s easy to discern when Jane is fully conscious, and her repeated jumps into visions of another place or time are also perfectly clear. It’s really not until the book’s final act that things get much more disorienting for the protagonist—and likely readers as well. Jane’s everydayness is rife with appetizing plot developments: Jimmy blames Jane for his adulterous ways, while the repugnant Briggs proves rather testy when Jane turns down his advances. The hypnotic sequences bolster the story with mystery, especially because Jane is sure, for instance, that she recognizes a farmhouse she keeps seeing. Supporting characters are dynamic, and not all are bad: sympathetic psychiatrist Eric Alford is willing to dabble in hypnosis on Jane’s behalf, and her work assistant/friend Carrie is charmingly cynical. Along the way, Alexander drops hints as to what’s truly going on, though he’s so good at that that a few readers may guess the ending. Nevertheless, the novel-long buildup has a strong, dizzyingly fun payoff. While the story concludes by resolving Jane’s dilemma, the coda opens the book to interpretation (or reinterpretation) and may have some readers flipping back to Page 1.
An arresting novel that grounds its story first before spinning readers off into a rewarding, dreamlike finale.Pub Date: July 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9914237-0-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Greyfield Media
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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