Earnest and engaging: a nicely turned-out if unsurprising debut that’s not likely to stay in a reader’s mind for long.
A twentysomething man comes of age somewhat belatedly, in part by discovering an old man’s secret past.
Nathan Carter is a true Boston Brahmin, but there wasn’t much silver left on the baby’s spoon by the time he was born, and his childhood was far from privileged. Now a thirtysomething slacker, Nathan spent most of his 20s hanging out in Boston, where he waited tables and moved passionlessly from one short-term girlfriend to another. When his father died and left him a small inheritance, Nathan took the money and left town, heading up to northern Vermont and settling in the small town of Eden. There, he took a job as a mailman and started going out with Kate, the daughter of the local tavernkeeper. It was beginning to look like a rural rerun of Boston—until Nathan met Wallace Fiske, the town recluse. An old Vermonter, Wallace grew up in Eden and worked his family’s farm on the outskirts of town. Ornery and brusque (even by New England standards), Wallace is not easy to make friends with, but he eventually opens up to Nathan and slowly, piece by piece, reveals to him the story of his life. The focus of it is Nora, Wallace’s late wife, whom Wallace fell in love with on first sight in the late 1940s. Wallace is short on details but he describes the miscarriage that broke Nora’s heart and took her will to live. What Nathan finds out on his own, however, is that Nora is, in fact, alive and well in upstate New York, long estranged from Wallace. What went wrong? Nathan and Kate are impulsive types, so they visit Nora to find out. It’s a predictably sad story, involving death, adultery, betrayal, and despair. Typical backwoods Vermont, in other words.
Earnest and engaging: a nicely turned-out if unsurprising debut that’s not likely to stay in a reader’s mind for long.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-4427-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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