Taking a holiday from his usual diet of lowlife Boston cops and crooks (Bomber's Law, 1993, etc.), Higgins books passage on the luxury liner America, where the upscale cast talks exactly like the downscale Higgins regulars back home. Racked with anxiety over the federal examiners baying at his recession-ridden Pilot Hill Bank and Trust, David Carroll allows his wife Frances to sweep him off for a week in London and on the recommissioned America's ``re-maiden voyage,'' as America staffer (and David's former mistress) Melissa Murray describes it. Frances knows all about Melissa, and thinks she's going into the trip with her eyes wide open; but she doesn't know that a confidence man aboard the ship, presumably retired attorney Burton Rutledge, has picked her and her husband as marks. Promptly at dinner the first night out, Rutledge presents himself at the Carrolls' table; the action thereafter, as you'd expect from Higgins, unfolds almost entirely over a series of mealtime conversations among the Carrolls and Rutledge—a virtuoso series of trios eventually reduced to duets by the Melissa'd absence of David. Even among Higgins's gallery of talkers, Rutledge is one silver-tongued sharpie: His ceremonious tales of his old acquaintance, dilettante Eldred Motley, and the vicissitudes of Amy Neville Motley Rutledge, their mutual wife, are worth the transatlantic tariff. Rutledge is so peerlessly garrulous, in fact, that the drama of the tale arises, † la Exterminating Angel, from your wondering whether the Carrolls are going to make it through their next rich dessert, or all the way to New York, without hearing Rutledge's pitch, or whether they'll end up eternally trapped, like the Flying Dutchman, mid-ocean and pre- fleecing. Have no fear: Higgins, obviously seeing the Statue of Liberty looming on the horizon, settles everything with a few brisk strokes, clearing the way for a peremptory ending but a satisfyingly bleak final tableau.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8050-3077-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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