A modest international romance, likely to please fans of the genre.
In Dixit’s (Wrong Means Right End, 2012, etc.) romance, a young Indian woman must make her way personally and professionally in America.
Eila Sood isn’t sure what to expect when she arrives in New York from Delhi: after all, she’s never visited the country, and she hasn’t seen her sister Sheela in seven years. Sent as an envoy from her aging parents, she hopes to repair ties with her sibling, who was cast out from the family for wedding an American man. But despite marrying for love, Sheela’s relationship with her husband is rocky, and Eila finds her sister trying to re-create a slice of India in suburban New Jersey. But Eila has her own problems: just as she’s beginning to adjust to her new job in Manhattan, her hours get cut in half; she winds up doing the books for a strip club and then working as an assistant for Brett Wright, the owner of a local upscale restaurant. Brett is intense, maddening, often rude, but always sexy, and from the moment Eila gets off the plane at JFK, she keeps running into him where she least expects it. Although she initially wants nothing to do with him, she inevitably gets pulled into his world—and she may finally have to face the fact that she isn’t putting up much of a fight. But how can she be the second child to go against everything her parents believe? This fourth novel from Dixit treads familiar narrative ground from an uncommonly explored cultural perspective. The exploration of Eila and Sheela’s relationship, and Sheela’s conflicting feelings about her marriage, are the strongest parts of the novel. Eila and Brett’s relationship, however, may be enjoyed by romance fans, but will be less persuasive for general readers. Anyone who’s read Twilight or Fifty Shades of Grey will be familiar with the story of a clumsy, insecure protagonist falling for a brooding, unattainable man, but the transition from Eila and Brett acting rudely to each other to realizing they’re in love is so quick that it feels jarring. He comes across as nothing more than a fantasy—and one that never comes down to earth.
A modest international romance, likely to please fans of the genre.Pub Date: June 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9903884-0-1
Page Count: 260
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
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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