THE PLEASURE OF ELIZA LYNCH

Name: THE PLEASURE OF ELIZA LYNCH
Author: Anne Enright
ISBN: 0-87113-868-9

by Anne Enright ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2003

A stylish account of the rise (she never actually falls) of a Latin American Moll Flanders—and a further step in Enright’s...

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Irish author Enright’s lush third novel is a real departure from its predecessors (What Are You Like?, 2000; The Wig My Father Wore, 2001): bleak, blunt studies of lonely women seeking familial and romantic connection.

This time, the eponymous heroine’s insatiable hunger to experience and possess make her an unstoppable feminine force: a Paraguayan Eva Peron (Enright’s Eliza being in fact based on a real historical figure). The story begins in 1854 when 19-year-old Eliza, a physician’s daughter on the rebound from an aborted marriage to a French surgeon, encounters Spanish railroad builder Francisco Solano López. He quickly supplants her several previous lovers, and the pregnant Eliza travels with López as his mistress to the Paraguayan capitol of Asuncion. There, he confronts the Catholic Church over the issue of her bastard son’s christening; goads Francisco (always referred to her as her “dear friend”) into becoming Paraguay’s ambitious, warmongering dictator; establishes a national theater and endears herself to her adopted country’s multitudes; and fascinates every male who wanders into the orbit of her rapacious beauty and vitality. Enright’s approach isn’t subtle: every chapter title denotes an object (“Veal,” “Champagne,” “Coffee,” etc.) related to Eliza’s progress, and the nature of her ineffable appeal is explicitly spelt out (“When a man is inside a woman, he rules the world”). But the tale consistently engages and entertains, and Enright sets up numerous interesting echoes and parallels by way of its unusual dual structure, in which Eliza’s own narrative of her exploits is confined to her early years (1854–5) in Paraguay, and successive later years are chronicled in chapters presented from the viewpoint of Scotsman William Stewart, López’s alcoholic personal physician (and another of Eliza’s many conquests).

A stylish account of the rise (she never actually falls) of a Latin American Moll Flanders—and a further step in Enright’s increasingly promising career.

Pub Date: March 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-87113-868-9

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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CAN YOU HOP?

by Lisa Lawston ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1999

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Hopping is not hard, for a frog, but when he asks other animals to join him, he finds that bats flap, lobsters snap, and dust flies when an especially large rhinoceros stomps. None of the creatures can do what the frog does so well, until he meets a rabbit, and it becomes a friendship bound by bounding. Vere’s creatures are reminiscent of Sandra Boynton’s: smiling, bright, and lively, unrestrained by this board book’s small dimensions. A hopping good time. (Board book. 1-4)

Pub Date: March 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-531-30131-1

Page Count: 22

Publisher: Orchard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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OVERHEAD

by Jack M. Bickham ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 20, 1991

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Tennis pro, Vietnam vet, and intelligence operative Brad Smith, who first served in Dropshot (1990), quits an irritating job in Texas to head for Montana, where his unusual skills are needed to open a new tennis resort and locate a murderous nearby secret agent. Well, whom else would you call to clean out the spies plaguing a mysterious Air Force lab just a backhand away from a troubled tennis camp? The debt-ridden sports resort, just bought by Smith's old tennis and spying pal Ted Treacher, provides the perfect cover for Smith—the only tennis-playing spy in America capable of recognizing his old archenemy Sylvester, the Soviet spy responsible for the death of Smith's late Yugoslavian tennis- playing wife. Sylvester, operating with a completely new face fresh from the plastic surgeon, is in Big Sky country to snatch a bit of strategic-defense technology from the research lab whose powerful secret electromagnetic pulses have been giving the local children leukemia. Also neighboring the resort is a secret toxic- waste dump owned by a beautiful but ruthless capitalist hussy who wants to close down the country club so she can get her toxic wastes back. Smith has to sort out all these secrets while cleaning up the financial and managerial mess his chum has made of what should be a fabulous destination for rich tennis players. Sylvester shoots at him, a sadistic deputy shoots at him, and Ivan Lendl shoots at him. Bodies pop out of the golf course. Credibility crushed in straight sets 6-2, 6-0, 6-1.