Gaskell has mastered the art of putting the fun in dysfunctional.
Gaskell's novel invites readers to monthly dinner parties featuring mouthwatering menus and a group of guests dealing not so well with various relationship issues.
Fran’s husband, Will, would rather work on his action-figure robots in the garage than listen to her concerns. Despite his distraction, Will does seem aware that Fran’s parenting skills are in need of improvement. Fran is terribly disturbed that her surly teenage daughter spends a small fortune on designer sunglasses to keep up appearances with the rich girls she attends private school with, but she then expects Will to repaint the living room, replace a kitchen counter and do major landscaping projects to impress their friends the next time they host the meeting of their monthly dinner club. Clearly, she is unaware that teaching by example trumps controlling by ultimatum. Jaime’s husband, Mark, would rather go to tennis tournaments to watch his snotty teenage daughter from a first marriage than help Jaime care for their two young children. This obsession makes Jaime think that perhaps Mark is having an affair with the tennis coach. While right about the affair, she is wrong about with whom. Audrey, childless and widowed at a young age, would rather get a dog than date the men her friends keep trying to set her up with. Nonetheless, she finds herself feeling hot and bothered in the presence of Will’s sexy single friend, Coop. Only Leland, the old widower from down the block, seems grounded and secure. Physically frail, Leland has a strong spirit, a ready sense of humor and often offers insightful advice on life before he dies. A series of dramatic crises force the dinner club members to confront their own flaws and work on their lives. All the characters at different times compare their lives to various contemporary TV shows and this book, chapter by chapter, could easily be transposed to serial episodes of a TV sitcom.
Gaskell has mastered the art of putting the fun in dysfunctional.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-553-38628-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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