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GOOD FAMILY

Name: GOOD FAMILY
Author: Terry Gamble
ISBN: 0-06-073794-8

by Terry Gamble ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2005

Though it honors Edward’s urging to slip “beneath the surface,” Gamble’s effort, albeit worthy, doesn’t go deep enough.

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Recovering alcoholic returns to her ancestral cottage to confront family ghosts, in Gamble’s second (The Water Dancers, 2003).

Maddie Addison has been estranged from her family for 11 years, since her infant daughter died of SIDS at the family summer home and she fell into despair, awash in booze. With the help of Ian, her filmmaking partner and best friend, she joined AA and has attained relative serenity in Manhattan. Now, however, she has been summoned back to the Aerie, a massive, ramshackle residence on Sand Isle in Upper Lake Michigan, a private island resort for the descendants of Midwestern oligarchs, including the Addisons, founders of a shampoo and cold-remedy empire. Maddie’s widowed mother, Evelyn, paying the wages of her inveterate tippling, is moribund after a stroke, and Maddie has returned for a final reckoning with her. But since her mother is now physically as well as emotionally incommunicado, Maddie must make do with exorcising her unresolved passion for her twin cousins, Derek and Edward, and parsing the strangeness of anorexic, guru-besotted cousin Adele. The story’s second part recaps Maddie’s youth—Aerie summers, when she trails Great-Grandmother Addie’s ghost, bundles in an upstairs room with Edward, who may or may not have whacked her pet chipmunk, and joyrides with wild-child sister Dana in the family station-wagon. She attends Harvard and NYU, blows her chance of marrying plastic-bag scion Jamie, marries fellow cineaste Angus instead, has his child. Back in 1999, she catches her niece Jessica and Derek’s son Beowulf flirting with kissing-cousin-dom and is bemused by cousin Sedgwick’s functioning drunkenness and Dana’s straitlaced Catholicism, overcompensation for a hush-hush abortion years before. As for Edward, he’s long since disappeared into madness after a stint in Vietnam. In all, Evelyn remains a cipher but so does Maddie, while Gamble skirts or underplays money and class issues, and genteel punch-pulling deflates any potential conflict.

Though it honors Edward’s urging to slip “beneath the surface,” Gamble’s effort, albeit worthy, doesn’t go deep enough.

Pub Date: June 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-06-073794-8

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE EULOGIST
by Terry Gamble

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WATER DANCERS
by Terry Gamble

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.