Should be one of the summer’s biggest beach books.
Bagshawe goes for the glitz in her big, brash, fantastically enjoyable first novel.
Siena McMahon doesn’t have much in common with the typical chick-lit heroine. She neither stumbles nor bumbles. She craves power, fame and rigorous sex, not chocolate, shoes or another glass of Chardonnay. She doesn’t eke out a living on the fringes of glamour; she was born smack in the middle of it. Her story is also a gossipy saga of the Hollywood dynasty that created her. Bagshawe makes a conscious break from Bridget Jones territory to revisit the glittery domain of Jacqueline Susann, Jackie Collins and Danielle Steel. The results are saucily delicious and utterly absorbing. The story begins in the 1970s, before Siena was born, just as legendary movie star and all-around bad guy Duke McMahon is installing his young mistress in the mansion he shares with his wife and their two children. This unorthodox arrangement leads to scandal, an illegitimate child and a lasting legacy of emotional dysfunction. The only daughter of Duke’s elder son, Siena spends her early years in a tangle of conflicting loyalties, open hatred and savage betrayals. Her estrangement from her family is more or less complete by the time she’s shipped off to an English boarding school. When she returns to Hollywood, she’s a supermodel well on her way to becoming a successful actress, but it will take spectacular tragedy and the love of a good man before she’s truly reconciled to her past and herself. Hot-tempered, oversensitive and ruthlessly ambitious, Siena is not an easy girl to love, but she’s certainly entertaining, and Bagshawe does an excellent job of creating her over-the-top yet believable character. In fact, even the most minor cast members here have well-defined personalities and real motivations. If her predecessors invested the rich and fabulous with epic grandeur, Bagshawe aims to make them accessible—not ordinary, but vividly human.
Should be one of the summer’s biggest beach books.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-446-57688-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
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
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