From Publishers Weekly
With considerable, if uneven, success, the four novellas in this volume trace the intersecting paths of characters met in Gifford's Wild at Heart. In the best and longest, "59 and Raining: The Story of Perdita Durango," Gifford adapts real-life incidents to his fictional purpose as his "weird and dangerous" heroine with "8-ball black eyes" and a Caribbean-born, drug-dealing santeria priest whose rituals require human sacrifice team up to kidnap two American teenagers in Mexico and take them along on a crime spree in Texas and California. This story leads back to Louisiana and Lula's mother, Marietta Fortune, who announces, "There's a Devil and he don't never quit," the lietmotif of these violence-ridden tales. Amid the usually abortive and often fatal activities of crime lords and small-time losers, Sailor and Lula Ripley prosper in both love and fortune, in the final story proud of their 30-year-old son, Pace, who's been in trouble and out, now leading trekking expeditions in Nepal. Gifford's sharp characterization, of people with names like Coot Veal, Dalceda Delahoussaye, the Rev. Goodin Plenty, is generally well served by on-pitch dialogue, though Sailor and Lula, in their 50s still sounding like adolescent runaways, provide an unconvincing center for the wild careenings elsewhere on stage. This volume is part of the publisher's Literary Landscape series, promoting works of fiction that claim to bring a particular setting vividly to life. Author tour.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
From Library Journal
The genre of these four novellas, a sequel to Gifford's Wild at Heart (made into the 1990 film of the same name), might be termed "gothic noir." They take place in an American South filled with hoodlums, dangerous women, psychopaths, epigram-spouting good old boys and girls, and an air of general malevolence. At the center are Sailor and Lula, the ill-fated lovers of Wild at Heart . They are reunited in New Orleans, years after the events of the earlier book, when Pace, their son, is kidnapped. Back together, they seek to redeem youthful mistakes through devotion to one another and everyday normalcy, though fully aware of the wild life nearby that threatens to pull their precarious union apart. Though an absurdist streak running through these tales nearly reduces them to caricature, Sailor and Lula's passion for one another gives these works a flesh-and-blood emotional reality. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/90.
- Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass.Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
