Heartfelt and charming; a book that goes down easy.
Achingly sweet and unexpectedly nuanced, Emmich’s clever debut follows the unlikely bond between a grief-stricken actor and a gifted 10-year-old girl in Jersey City.
Joan Lennon Sully is a 10-year-old with a startling gift: she can remember, in exacting detail, everything that’s ever happened to her. She knows how many times her mother has said “it never fails” in the past six months; she remembers the date and reason for every time she’s ever cried (Wednesday, March 25, 2009: the day Pepper was put to sleep; Wednesday, May 15, 2013: the day Mrs. Dresden called time on a test before she was finished). But she knows most people do not have her memory; most people, she understands, forget things, and Joan Lennon does not want to be forgotten. So when she spots an ad in the paper for “The Next Great Songwriter Contest,” she sees her answer: a good song is like a permanent reminder, she reasons. If she can win the Next Great Songwriter Contest with a Joan Lennon original, then she’ll never be forgotten. She just needs to find the right collaborator—and that’s where Gavin Winters comes in. An old friend of Joan’s parents, Gavin is a successful actor in Los Angeles overwhelmed with grief after his partner Sydney’s sudden death. After he has a very public breakdown (fire was involved), Joan’s parents invite Gavin to take refuge with them in New Jersey, where he and Joan strike up an unusual deal: he’ll help Joan with her song if, in return, Joan will recount her memories of Sydney, snapshots from his few visits to the family over the past several years. But what starts as a source of comfort for Gavin takes an unsettling turn when Joan unknowingly reveals details that force Gavin to contemplate the possibility that Sydney may have been keeping secrets of his own. Overwhelmingly tender, sometimes verging on saccharine, the novel gets by on its profoundly likable pair of leading characters: what the book lacks in bite, it makes up for in charm.
Heartfelt and charming; a book that goes down easy.Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-31699-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
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