Trite, unfunny first novel with, like, an incredibly annoying heroine.
Girl attorney grows up.
Ellie Winters just isn’t happy. And what is the world (which evidently revolves around her) going to do about it? Nothing? Boo-hoo. Can it be true that a closetful of designer shoes by Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo aren’t enough? But all the glossy magazines Ellie ever read promised bliss through conspicuous consumption. Why, oh why, did she believe them? Rife with other chick-lit epiphanies and clichés, the story plods on predictably: Ellie has a dull but dependable boyfriend, uninspiring job, interfering mom, cantankerous pet, and is looking for love. Gee, Ted Langston, that distinguished TV news anchor she just met at an upscale Georgetown party, is so handsome. Maybe she won’t have to settle for boring, pudgy Eric after all. He smells funny, anyway. Ted Langston smells good. And mature men like Ted really appreciate things like blow jobs, too, according to one of her best friends, which might make it worth messing up her carefully applied lipstick. Ted is very successful, and he’s been divorced for ages. No kids, thank God. Immature Ellie couldn’t handle that kind of competition. But when she runs into his brittle, beautiful ex-wife swaggering around in Ted’s bathrobe at his apartment, Ellie is heartbroken. Maybe she won’t find love, get married and move into a Potomac McMansion by her 30th birthday. Life is so unfair. And how come she just got canned? Ellie is devastated, even though she hated every minute of all those stupid meetings and her hard-driving boss. Doesn’t anyone understand that she’s entitled to everything she wants?
Trite, unfunny first novel with, like, an incredibly annoying heroine.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-553-38224-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
Although Heller creates with chilling efficiency the bleakness of a world largely bereft of life as we know it, he holds out...
A post-apocalyptic novel in which Hig, who only goes by this mononym, finds not only survival, but also the possibility of love.
As in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the catastrophe that has turned the world into its cataclysmic state remains unnamed, but it involves “The Blood,” a highly virulent and contagious disease that has drastically reduced the population and has turned most of the remaining survivors into grim hangers-on, fiercely protective of their limited territory. Hig lives in an abandoned airplane hangar and keeps a 1956 Cessna, which he periodically takes out to survey the harsh and formidable landscape. While on rare occasions he spots a few Mennonites, fear of “The Blood” generally keeps people at more than arm’s length. Hig has established a defensive perimeter by a large berm, competently guarded by Bangley, a terrifying friend but exactly the kind of guy you want on your side, since he can pot intruders from hundreds of yards away, and he has plenty of firepower to do it. Haunted by a voice he heard faintly on the radio, Hig takes off one day in search of fellow survivors and comes across Pops and Cima, a father and daughter who are barely eking out a living off the land by gardening and tending a few emaciated sheep. Like Bangley, Pops is laconic and doesn’t yield much, but Hig understandably finds himself attracted to Cima, the only woman for hundreds of miles and a replacement for the ache Hig feels in having lost his pregnant wife, Melissa, years before.
Although Heller creates with chilling efficiency the bleakness of a world largely bereft of life as we know it, he holds out some hope that human relationships can be redemptive.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-95994-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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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