- Hardcover: 256 pages
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster (Nov 30 2004)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0743250796
- ISBN-13: 978-0739449691
- Product Dimensions: 23.9 x 16.5 x 2.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 454 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,031,432 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
In his 28th novel, Pulitzer-winner McMurtry again displays his knack for compelling characters and plots, this time as two women of a certain age take a road trip through Texas. Sixty-year-old widow Maggie Clary hasn't felt like herself since her hysterectomy; though her Hollywood company, Prime Loops, is doing well—they dub in the grunts and groans for movie soundtracks—she secretly wonders if she's going "bats." Maggie's three well-intentioned daughters have appeared on her doorstep for a Sunday morning "intervention." Though Maggie's diminutive Sicilian psychiatrist has improved her mood (thanks, in part, to their mid-session sex), she decides to follows the advice of a flirtatious waiter and try a change of scenery. Maggie invites fellow "looper" and best friend Connie (the two have been inseparable—and boy crazy—since they were 14), to join her on a drive to her octogenarian Aunt Cooney's Texas chicken ranch. Despite family troubles that threaten to sabotage their trip, the two stay the course on a road rife with reprobates, from a relentless "professional" hitchhiker to a mild-mannered car thief forever violating his parole. Aunt Cooney's brief appearance is among the high points of McMurtry's life-affirming tale: sporting an "old mashed-up" cowboy hat and an abundance of rouge, the gregarious granny greets her city slicker niece by yanking a pistol out of her pocket and firing shots into the sky.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Few contemporary novelists can handle a road saga like McMurtry. His most memorable works of that genre, Lonesome Dove (1986) and the Berrybender Chronicles, are massive, sprawling epics set against an untamed frontier. His latest book is on a smaller scale, but it is a gem, with two memorable characters and delightful vignettes. Maggie and Connie are two 60-year-old women who eke out a marginal existence in contemporary Los Angeles as loopers--dubbing voices and sounds for B-movie tracks. Friends since grade school, they both fear life, especially their love life, has passed them by. Hoping to jump-start their lives with a bit of adventure, they decide to drive a van cross country to visit Maggie's aunt, who runs a Texas chicken farm. Their brief odyssey is filled with wondrous scenes of natural beaty, visits to amusingly odd museums and tourist traps, and encounters with a variety of eccentric and occasionally dangerous characters. What makes this work special is McMurtry's gift for creating a genuinely likable, believable pair of protagonists and weaving an often touching fabric around their intertwined relationship. Maggie and Connie can be frustratingly self-absorbed, even whiny, and they often irritate each other, but their shared experiences over decades help make this a quirky but enjoyable buddy story. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
MAGGIE WAS rummaging fretfully in her small pantry, wondering why in the world she could never remember to buy tea bags, when she happened to glance out the window just in time to see her daughter Kate's enormous SUV whip into her driveway and stop. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
MAGGIE WAS rummaging fretfully in her small pantry, wondering why in the world she could never remember to buy tea bags, when she happened to glance out the window just in time to see her daughter Kate's enormous SUV whip into her driveway and stop. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Loop Group,
By Stan Kwasniowski "Cooooool" (Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Loop Group (Hardcover)
First let me say that McMurtry is one of my favorite authors, besides, Wilber Smith, Ken Follett. He is a great author and this book well written, but you know what, he writes it so good that when I finished reading this book it was depressing. Maybe that's what he wanted to enstil in us, I don't know. Fast book to read, lots of details.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
1.7 out of 5 stars (40 customer reviews) 19 of 20 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
Where do I go to get my time back?,
By Fredly19 - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Loop Group (Hardcover)
I am really angry with myself for actually finishing this book. It was so bad, I kept thinking, "But this is Larry McMurtry - he'll tie it all up and salvage something out of this mess!"He doesn't. From the first sentence to the last, this is the most empty, vapid, uninspiring, inane book I've ever read. This is my first review, and I was not happy to find that I had to give it at least 1 star. I love kooky, unconventional characters. But there has to be some reason for them, and some imagination used in writing them. The "Zany characters" you meet in this book are empty and uninteresting. Every single character in this book is driven solely by their basest instincts. There's even a determined and relentless child molester, who is treated as just another zany character. The main characters can't manage to summon so much as a whiff of disapproval for their pederastic friend, and no sympathy is to be found for his 9-year-old victim. There is no pacing to the plot. Once the big road trip finally started, I kept thinking that something worth writing about will happen any time now... instead, suddenly the trip is over. Then, after the return... nothing happens. Character development? Maggie and Connie are the two most self-centered, vacuous, clueless old ladies you'll eve meet - and just as much so at the end of the book as they are at the beginning. I have reached a whole new level of respect for professional book reviewers... zero. Seeing the glowing reviews of this steaming heap of feces is just pathetic. There. I think I'm done now. I felt I had to redeem my time, if even a little, by doing what I can to help steer as many people as I can away from this book. 12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
I have an excuse for finishing this book...,
By Denise Brown - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Loop Group (Hardcover)
...I was stuck on a long international flight with a flight magazine that hadn't been changed since my flight out, a movie I'd already seen (twice), and a dead battery on my mp3 player.Otherwise, after the first chapter I'd have used it to wipe down the basin as a courtesy to the next passenger, then watched it disappear in a rush of blue water. I don't know who these people who write the cover blurbs are, but I suspect that the publisher knows some very embarrassing secrets about them. And I know for sure that the reviewer who had the nerve to say this is McMurtry's best book since "Terms of Endearment" has never read that book, though he may have seen the pale shadow of a (critically acclaimed -hello-) movie that was made from it. I'm thinkin' that Larry is dead and whomever found the body put together this book from the gleanings of his old notebooks and wastebasket contents. Because that's what it seems like - a collection of vague ideas, impotent plot outlines, and blurry sketches of characters either too similar to ones used in previous novels (the chicken farmer aunt,for instance, is archetypical of McMurtry's crazy-like-foxes old codger Texans), or characters not fully fleshed out. The protagonist Maggie herself, never does get colored all the way in, so that you end the book with a "yeah, so?" feeling. You don't know or care any more about her by the last sentence than you did in the first. Too, the text is afflicted with cliche and overused adjectives. "Vast" is a favorite- it describes everything from pots of pasta to areas of desert. And there are many little inconsistences of the type that make me wonder if the editors were illiterate or apathetic. Probably both. "Loop Group" is a huge disappointment. Please, if you want to read a McMurty book, try another: "All My Friends are Going to Be Strangers," "Lonesome Dove," or "Anything for Billy", or any of the other westerns. Perhaps "Terms of Endearment." Those are books that can change your life just because they make you know things you didn't know before. Maybe the existence of this book is a perfect example of why creativity can't be motivated by contract obligations. 14 of 15 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
That's why they make chocolate and vanilla,
By Cathy In MS - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Loop Group (Hardcover)
To each their own, but you do have to wonder.... all of the good reviews here come across as professional writing. Like professional payback or something. When you get down to regular people telling what they think of the story of depressed Maggie taking her wacky best friend Connie on a fun filled trip across California to Texas, it hits the mark.If you had taken Larry McMurtry's name off of this book you would not have been able to convince me he actually wrote this drivel. You want to whack Maggie across the head and tell her to act her age or even like a mature 25 year old and get a life. Connie is so disagreeable I couldn't see how someone could be around her for two minutes much less be friends since sixth grade. This is a childish book about childish grown-ups and the only emotion it stirred up in me was the regret I wasted my time reading about two 60 year old wasting theirs. |
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