A beautifully composed, tragic narrative with relevance to today’s morass of chaos and bigotry.
Tickel’s haunting novel, the third installment of his Hymns of Kingdom series, is set in 1915 southern Texas during the time of the Mexican Revolution.
Thomas Asher is a complex man. He is a Texas Ranger past his prime. An injury has left him in constant pain and addicted to laudanum, the narcotic of the day. It relieves his discomfort and eases a mind still struggling with past hurt and grievances. His new assignment, requiring several days on horseback, will challenge him physically and emotionally. The Mexican Revolution has made the Rangers edgy, worried that the fighting will cross the Rio Grande into a state where the white population is a distinct minority. When a petroleum geologist spots Emilio Sanchez, a Mexican, in the desert with a horse and pack mule and casually mentions it to a deputy sheriff at his boardinghouse, he catches the lawman’s interest. That interest leads him to embellish the tale a bit, “unaware, for now, that his desire to impress a man he does not like will result in the death of a man he does not know.” The story makes its way up the chain to Capt. Render Moates of Ranger Company D in Laredo. Moates’ fateful decision to send his Rangers to track down a “contingent of Mexicans” will result in the reckless accidental shooting of Sanchez. Asher makes a life-changing decision and volunteers to stay behind to watch over the slowly dying man. Tickel has added a cosmic overlay to a basic morality play, but his linguistic skills and ability to tell a solid earthbound story should engage even the least spiritually oriented readers. When Asher begins to share his desperately needed laudanum with Sanchez, he transitions from has-been to prime mover in the battle to get justice for Sanchez. Among the cast of secondary characters, several of whom will have to face their own crises of conscience over the debacle, the most important is Beulah, Asher’s wife. Tickel unwinds the backstory of her days as a prostitute with tenderness and a not-so-gentle swipe at society’s hypocrisy.
A beautifully composed, tragic narrative with relevance to today’s morass of chaos and bigotry.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9888900-3-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Ventris & Bywater LLC
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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
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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