Enchanting, though the desire for an enthralling tale might not be fulfilled.
Be careful what you wish for: For good or ill, magic comets fulfill the wishes of three women.
Restless, unhappy and full of desire, three very different women look up to the night sky and each make a wish on their own passing comet. Grace, jealous of her best friend’s charmed life, is granted the power to make men fall in love with her; Skylar, embarrassed of being poor, is given the power to bring money and success into her life; and Alina, haunted by her sister’s death, is bestowed the revenge-based power to undo the lives of others. For a short time, these newfound powers fulfill the women’s desires. Grace meets a wonderful man who dotes on her and buys her anything she desires. Skylar also meets a man, who promises to take care of her. And Alina, once Skylar’s high school friend, is put in the perfect place to get revenge on the friend that abandoned her. Hook impressively handles her three main characters, making each feel distinct and equally important. Grace’s, Skylar’s and Alina’s lives intersect at different points in the novel in a multitude of different ways. Grace falls for Liam, who has been in love with Skylar since high school, although he’s used Alina to fulfill his own needs; Alina crosses paths with Johnny, Skylar’s high school flame, who may just have his own comet-given powers; and Skylar befriends Grace, who happened to once work for the love of Skylar’s life, Darren. Despite a promising premise, Hook’s narrative is somewhat aimless and underdeveloped. There are lovely moments when Hook reaches for deeper meanings, as when Grace realizes the interconnectedness of everything, or in Alina’s struggle to free herself from Johnny. But all too often, Hook’s narrative revolves merely around how these women define themselves in relation to the men in their lives. Nonetheless, the scene of Grace’s wedding highlights the novel, as does the comets’ return.
Enchanting, though the desire for an enthralling tale might not be fulfilled.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1470113216
Page Count: 336
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2013
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
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
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