For their second tag-team novel, Patterson and Gross (2nd Chance) get medieval on us with this heavy-breathing, lose-the-blouse epic about a hunky 11th-century French innkeeper seeking revenge on the dastardly lord who kidnapped his wife. As the bodice-ripper-for-guys plot unfolds, hero Hugh De Luc infiltrates the villain's castle by posing as a jester. The blood 'n' guts flow, the undergarments fly and the lame jokes flop like something from amateur night at the Ramada Inn. The novel's sudden shifts in tone—from sad to wacky to really gross—could give you whiplash. Anachronistic phrases are everywhere (did they really say "new duds" in the Middle Ages?) and the dialogue stinks like a dungeon ("You are a dreamer, boy, but, yikes, what good jester isn't?").
Give the authors a little credit for a fast pace, a silly but fun subplot about the search for a religious relic, and a sympathetic lady-in-waiting seemingly dreamed up with Meg Ryan in mind. But when it comes to having a sense for the medieval era, Monty Python and the Holy Grail looks like a documentary by comparison. (Little, Brown, $27.95)
BOTTOM LINE: Throw it in the moat
by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Jessica is a beautiful 16-year-old who attracts men on drug-ravaged Tremont Avenue in The Bronx. Coco is a good-hearted 14-year-old who tucks lollipops into her ponytail and slathers Vaseline on her face to prevent scarring from unavoidable fights. Journalist LeBlanc spent a decade immersed in the lives of these two Puerto Rican girls and their very extended families. She emerges with a riveting portrait of the other America, where "better than was the true marker" of success: "Family fights indoors...were better-than taking private business to the street. Heroin was bad, but crack was worse. A girl who had four kids by two boys was better than a girl who had four by three."
LeBlanc doesn't hand-wring. She simply follows the girls and their random families on chaotic days at clinics, prisons, welfare offices. With harrowing eloquence, they remind us that people are more than the sum of their circumstances. (Scribner, $25)
BOTTOM LINE: Rich portrait of the poor
by Wendy Holden
Blame Bridget. Ms. Jones and her diary have spawned a host of breezy books about the romantic misadventures of endearingly kooky but insecure British women. The latest rendition follows Grace, a publicist with an obscure London publisher, who is mired in a miserable relationship with "the chairman of the local Revolutionary Socialists" until a drunken encounter with one of her authors launches a chain of personal and professional disasters.
Some of Holden's satire is well-aimed: A secondary character—a scheming and staggeringly inept tabloid reporter—steals the book. But events come together in an astonishingly predictable fashion, and every twist is relentlessly telegraphed. Gossip Hound is less for singletons and more for simpletons. (Plume, $13)
BOTTOM LINE: Not much bite
by Erik Larson
This true story of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair divides its attentions between a master builder and an equally dedicated murderer. While architect Daniel H. Burnham oversaw such marvels as what was then the world's largest building, a serial killer, Henry Holmes, preyed on visitors in a nearby hotel he built and equipped with a macabre basement killing room. In a style that is suspenseful as well as entertaining, Larson shows us how both our highest aspirations and our most loathsome urges figured in the creation of the modern world. (Crown, $25.95)
BOTTOM LINE: World class
by Carlos Eire
The privileged son of a Havana judge, Carlos Eire was 8 years old in 1959 when Castro marched into the city. This rich, engrossing memoir, mainly of Eire's childhood before he escaped to Miami at age 11, has the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A rich man's swimming pool is turned into a shark tank; the author's father claims to be the reincarnation of Louis XVI of France; after Castro's revolution poor people move into empty cages of a former private zoo. How much of this is strictly true and how much fancy isn't clear.
The spell is broken in the sections following Eire's struggles in the United States: He never saw his father again. But throughout, Eire's story is illuminated by his belief in redemption and the transforming power of art. (Free Press, $25)
BOTTOM LINE: Magical memory tour
by Carol Goodman
Page-turner of the week
The Irish legend of the selkie, a seal-woman who pines for her watery home, is at the center of this witty portrait of a striving writer that almost imperceptibly evolves into a gothic mystery romance. Manhattanite Iris Greenfeder, who grew up hearing tales of the selkie, moves to upstate New York to manage the hotel in which she lived as a child. There she gets involved with a former student, Aidan, and finds that her mother, a novelist who died in a mysterious fire, kept secrets that could endanger Iris's life.
Though the villain is a little too easy to peg, Seduction enchants with its fairy-tale motif and sensuous atmospherics. There's water, water everywhere, from the raindrops on Aidan's eyelashes to the eddying mists along the Hudson River. (Ballantine, $23.95)
BOTTOM LINE: Damp delight
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours shares his picks among recent releases.
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. Eugenides uses a sensationalistic subject to speak profoundly and movingly about life on Earth.
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. If Gibson's books weren't in the science fiction section, he'd be much better known. His vividly imagined cyberspace-dominated worlds are peopled by rich characters. He makes the rest of us novelists feel like antiques.
The Ecstatic by Victor LaValle. In his first novel, LaValle, who understands that comedy and tragedy can't always be separated, tells the story of an African-American family struggling to survive in the wilds of New York.
Child of My Heart by Alice McDermott. Like all her novels, this is a marvel of insight and compassion. McDermott writes about love with the precision of a jeweler.
Tourmaline by Joanna Scott. One of the most gifted writers at work today, Scott is brilliant, huge-hearted, devastating. In her seventh novel, about a family exiled to the island of Elba, she's at the top of her form.
- Contributors:
- Sean Daly,
- Christina Cheakalos,
- Dan Jewel,
- Scott Nybakken,
- Tom Conroy,
- Bella Stander.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
