In her second novel, Baker (The Little Giant of Aberdeen County, 2009) follows the lives of two sisters whose family has always harvested salt that may or may not have magical powers over their Cape Cod community.
The town of Prospect (a town unbelievably untouched by modern life or tourists) depends on salt from the Gilly Salt Creek Farm for luck; the residents read their futures in the colors rising from Gilly salt thrown on the annual bonfire. Although the Gillys attend the same Catholic Church as everyone else in town, the feared power of their salt makes them permanent outsiders. As the book opens, the Gilly sisters have grown estranged. Younger, pretty Claire has married local rich boy (and her sister Jo's former boyfriend) Whit Turner, and joined local society, while Jo remains on the struggling farm. Why is Whit so anxious to buy Jo out and Claire so anxious to turn people against Jo's salt? Flashbacks show Jo has always been committed to harvesting the salt since her childhood in the 1950s, while book-smart Claire always wanted desperately to get away. Jo’s one childhood playmate was Whit, son of the wealthiest family in town. Whit’s mother wanted the children to have nothing to do with each other, and Jo’s mother was equally unenthusiastic. Shortly before charming but headstrong Whit left town for boarding school, he tried to proclaim his love to Jo. But having learned a family secret—one that most readers will guess way too soon—Jo broke off their budding romance. Years later, after Claire's boyfriend broke her heart by becoming a priest, a newly returned Whit wooed her. Twelve years later their marriage has soured. Then Whit begins an affair with a lonely young girl who has recently arrived in Prospect. When she becomes pregnant, Whit shows his darker side and all hell breaks loose. There are two fires, one accidental and one perhaps unintentionally lethal, before a discomfortingly amoral happy ending. Baker’s gift for richly embroidered fantasy only partially compensates for the novel’s inconsistency. Alice Hoffman–lite.
Pub Date: March 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-446-19423-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
