An inoffensive, lightweight Christian parable.
Stewart tells the story of a globe-trotting music box in this debut spiritual novel.
Retired sea captain James Calloway is dozing on the beach near his Alabama home when something unusual appears in the water: “As the sun set with reds and burnt orange, in the distance, a wooden box rode the waves.” Calloway inspects the container after it washes ashore: it holds seven antique rum bottles, a Hebrew scroll, and a music box made of gopher wood. What’s more, it’s accompanied by an honor guard of different types of birds that don’t normally flock together. Calloway brings the box home for his wife’s inspection, and she thinks the objects must have survived from biblical times. Each night, when his work is done, Calloway takes the music box and one of the bottles down to the beach. He drinks the heavenly liquid, which allows him to hear the otherworldly music that the box plays. Then he drifts off to sleep, and in his dreams, he travels with the floating box around the world, which washes up on different shores to answer the prayers of people who most need its spiritual power, such as a boy taken from his parents by pirates and a girl suffering from polio. Stewart’s prose manages to capture some of the fairy-tale magic of its story. However, he often repeats words and phrases in a way that robs the narrative of its poetry: “Unlike his father before him, he became cold-hearted over the years. He was not generous with his wealth over the years. He was not passionate about sharing his wealth with his fellow man in need or even helping the poor or indigent who lived in the lower portside of Italy.” The individual stories in the dreams, too, are not always as well-crafted as they could have been, often relying on simplistic narratives and stock characters. However, the novel’s overall structure—with its soothing Gulf Coast framing device and vignettes set in different ports across the globe—is pleasant and compelling enough to keep the reader moving forward.
An inoffensive, lightweight Christian parable.Pub Date: March 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5127-7791-8
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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