Synopsis
Thirty-eight years after falling in love with beautiful Amy Lourie, a wealthy Jewish girl, while working as a waiter in the Catskills, Madison Lee "Bobo" Murphy, a rural Southerner, returns to the Catskills and once again encounters Amy. 60,000 first printing.
Reviews
Perhaps destined to become this season's The Bridges of Madison County , this sentimental romance novel by the author of To Dance with the White Dog pulls on the heartstrings as it tells a bittersweet tale of thwarted love. Naive and gentlemanly Madison Lee ("Bobo") Murphy is 17 when, in 1955, he leaves rural Georgia to work at a resort in the Catskills, where he experiences instant culture shock among the inn's Jewish clientele. He comes under the influence of Avrum Feldman, an elderly eccentric who has devoted his life to the memory of Amelita Galli-Curci, the legendary soprano: "the voice of the music spoke to Avrum, and the power to wish, to dream, was released in him." Avrum is regarded by locals as a crazy old man; but Bobo cherishes him as a prophet and visionary, and Avrum encourages Bobo when he falls chastely in love with Amy Lourie, a rich Jewish girl from New York visiting the resort with her protective parents. Bobo and Amy spend an unforgettable summer, but then they part, ignoring Avrum's pronouncements about the importance of "one grand, undeniable moment of change." Now, 38 years later, Bobo has returned to the Catskills to bury Avrum--and discovers that Amy is there too. Though Kaye obviously models his narrative style on Pat Conroy, he does not have the same gifts for melodious prose. But he conveys his homespun truths and a heavy air of nostalgia with enough skill to make readers project their own wish-fulfillment fantasies onto his second-time-around lovers. Major ad/promo; film rights sold to Warner Brothers and the Lee Rich Company; audio rights to Simon & Schuster; Literary Guild selection; author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Long-separated lovers reunite in a quiet Catskill Mountains resort town, but precious pretty prose and you-had-to-be-there nostalgia fail to set readers' hearts aflutter. Kay (To Dance with the White Dog, 1990) takes as his protagonist Bobo Murphy, an artist in his 50s who has spent all his life in the South--except for one memorable summer in 1955 when, as a recent high school graduate, he waited tables at the Pine Hill Inn in the Catskills' Shandaken Valley. For nearly five decades, Bobo has clung to his memories of that idyllic summer--the one time, he feels, when he was truly happy and alive. When he learns of the death of Avrum Feldman, Pine Hill's oldest eccentric and his close friend, Bobo grabs the chance to return to Pine Hill and have another look around. He is saddened to find that the old resort hotel and village, whose cultured German-Jewish visitors and clever, wisecracking employees had once seemed as exotic to this Georgia farmboy as Timbuktu, are now a seedy backwater, as barren and dull as his own life. Explorations of the town bring to mind Bobo's first encounters with old Avrum, whose romantic obsession with a famous opera singer inspired the 17-year-old Bobo to woo and almost win a beautiful young Jewish woman named Amy Lourie at the hotel. As he relives that passion, which ended when he returned south to marry a girl back home, Bobo is overwhelmed by regret. Luckily, Amy has also heard of Avrum's death. She appears, ready and willing to give Bobo a second chance at joy. Kay has a gift for evoking beauty in the mundane, but it's still hard to fall for a romantic hero named Bobo. (Literary Guild selection; film rights to Warner Bros.; author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
The immensely gifted author of the best-selling To Dance with the White Dog (1990) demonstrates his narrative versatility by offering a rare and wonderful love story. When Bobo Murphy, a middle-aged artist of moderate success and talent, revisits the Catskill Mountains to bury an elderly friend, he is haunted by memories of the magical summer he spent working as a waiter at the posh Pine Hill Inn. During the course of that idyllic sojourn, 17-year-old Bobo, a callow Southern youth who had seldom ventured far beyond the gentle red hills of Georgia, unexpectedly forged a powerful and enduring bond with Avrum Feldman, a cranky, insightful retired furrier from New York who had devoted his entire adult life to the unrequited worship of a renowned opera singer. In addition, Bobo had also found and lost the one great love of his life, wealthy and breathtakingly beautiful Amy Lourie, the pampered only child of protective Jewish parents. As the past and the present seem to coalesce, Avrum's death and Amy's sudden reappearance force Bobo to reevaluate the wisdom of his self-imposed compromises and to relearn the mystical life lessons taught to him by his extraordinary mentor. An absolutely enchanted and lyrical testimonial to the indomitable spirit of friendship and the tenacity of true love. Margaret Flanagan
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