A lush, vibrant portrayal of the creative process, a daughter’s love, and the unstoppable maelstrom of grief.
A young painter on the verge of success is waylaid by the sudden death of her complicated father in this debut novel.
Veronica Gonzalez is ready to be finished struggling through her painting career. But after a brief business trip to New York City—a place she left long ago, unable to cope with its excesses—she finds herself on the cusp of a big break and a shift in her luck: she’s being offered solo exhibition space at Art Basel, a major festival for contemporary work. Upon returning to Miami, where she lives with her tepid boyfriend, her father is found near death in his apartment. After he dies in the hospital, Veronica is paralyzed by her loss, terrifying her art dealer and threatening her prospects, but then she begins to pour her emotions into her work, pulling physical and emotional reminders of her father’s life, mistakes, and legacy into a massive art piece. Once this project begins, the novel’s chapters are titled with paint colors—Payne’s gray, hunter green, orange—and the subsequent memory or scenes revolve around that theme, sometimes literally, sometimes more loosely. This formal conceit is a risky move, in that it only emerges partway through the novel, but it succeeds, giving the reader a hauntingly fragmented portrait of a woman trying to pay homage to and be honest with herself about her father’s great love and cruelty and the nuance of her heritage. Veronica’s story is a relentless engine, told in rich, smart prose and lucid detail—equal parts elegy and portrait of an artist.
A lush, vibrant portrayal of the creative process, a daughter’s love, and the unstoppable maelstrom of grief.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9913555-4-9
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Shade Mountain Press
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Thoroughbreds and Virginia blue-bloods cavort, commit murder, and fall in love in Roberts's (Hidden Riches, 1994, etc.) latest romantic thriller — this one set in the world of championship horse racing. Rich, sheltered Kelsey Byden is recovering from a recent divorce when she receives a letter from her mother, Naomi, a woman she has believed dead for over 20 years. When Kelsey confronts her genteel English professor father, though, he sheepishly confesses that, no, her mother isn't dead; throughout Kelsey's childhood, she was doing time for the murder of her lover. Kelsey meets with Naomi and not only finds her quite charming, but the owner of Three Willows, one of the most splendid horse farms in Virginia. Kelsey is further intrigued when she meets Gabe Slater, a blue-eyed gambling man who owns a neighboring horse farm; when one of Gabe's horses is mated with Naomi's, nostrils flare, flanks quiver, and the romance is on. Since both Naomi and Gabe have horses entered in the Kentucky Derby, Kelsey is soon swept into the whirlwind of the Triple Crown, in spite of her family's objections to her reconciliation with the notorious Naomi. The rivalry between the two horse farms remains friendly, but other competitors — one of them is Gabe's father, a vicious alcoholic who resents his son's success — prove less scrupulous. Bodies, horse and human, start piling up, just as Kelsey decides to investigate the murky details of her mother's crime. Is it possible she was framed? The ground is thick with no-goods, including haughty patricians, disgruntled grooms, and jockeys with tragic pasts, but despite all the distractions, the identity of the true culprit behind the mayhem — past and present — remains fairly obvious. The plot lopes rather than races to the finish. Gambling metaphors abound, and sexual doings have a distinctly equine tone. But Roberts's style has a fresh, contemporary snap that gets the story past its own worst excesses.
Pub Date: June 13, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14059-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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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