Shadow Ranch: A Novel

Lainie Carpenter has lost her four-year-old son and is about to lose her marriage and sanity as well. The impact of young Spencer's death has strongly touched the lives of Bop, her grandfather, and her ambitionless, guitar-strumming brother, Russell, whose own love relationship is rapidly coming undone.
Pushing eighty, Bop is a fierce and crusty old man - a retired workaholic businessman, wealthy beyond imagining, a lover of horses and the Southern California landscape where he grew up - who falls in love with a retired stripper, Earlynn Sommers. Tender and earthy, this romance will change the lives of the Carpenter grandchildren in the most unexpected ways. Each of these beautifully drawn characters will have a different experience of love, and loss; each of their stories tugs at the heartstrings.

Yet another sensitive family drama set in today's New West from the author of Hank & Chloe (1993) and Blue Rodeo (1994)--this one featuring a rich and feisty California octogenarian, his ex- stripper lover, and the troubled grandchildren who disapprove, disapprove, disapprove. The Carpenter clan of southern California has been rich ever since the family-owned Shadow Ranch started shipping its citrus fruit all over the country, but its members have carried a curse through the generations as well. The curse takes the form of a defective heart--a genetic time bomb that has already taken the lives of 80-year-old Bop's grown son and his only great-grandson, four-year-old Spencer. It's hard for Bop's surviving grandchildren, Lainie and Russell, to understand why their gentle father had to die while irascible old Bop is still kicking in his landmark Frank Lloyd Wright house back on the bay--running through a series of gold-digging wives, riding his bad-tempered horse, and trying to run his grandkids' lives even though they stubbornly refuse to take his money. Lainie has enough problems as it is--trying to maintain her marriage and hold onto her part-time job in the wake of her son's death. Russell, whose casual love affairs and career as a used-record salesman have proved most galling to his grandfather, looks on the old man with greater equanimity--although when Bop takes up with Earlynn, an ex-stripper he spots on the Sally Jesse Raphael Show, Russell worries that Bop's worst faults may turn out to be his own. In the end, time heals all wounds, with help from good-hearted Earlynn, and the Carpenters find themselves happy at last, contrary to all expectations. Less eccentric and arresting than Hank & Chloe, with a way of rambling for long stretches, though Mapson's empathy for the modern western psyche still elucidates and entertains. (Literary Guild alternate selection; $40,000 ad/promo; author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Mapson combines larger-than-life characters and earthy dialogue in a story with more suds than substance. It's been three long years since Lainie Carpenter's four-year-old son died from heart disease, and none of the Carpenters has fully recovered from the loss. Patriarch Charles Russell Carpenter II, a thrice-married cowboy-millionaire who resides in a dilapidated Frank Lloyd Wright house, can't fix his family's problems with money no matter how hard he tries. Granddaughter Lainie, awash in unpaid hospital bills and chronic depression, is at odds with both her grandfather and her husband. Lainie's brother, Russell, feels trapped by a soulless relationship with a divorcee. Their luck begins to change when Charles weds his fourth wife, a brash former stripper who helps the family reconcile. Mapson creates likable characters and has a breezy, readable style, but she loads down her characters with more than their fair share of life's problems. Still, even as readers grow weary of the onslaught, the relentless pull of her narrative will keep them glued to the page. Joanne Wilkinson