Where the River Ends
There’s sweet and sensitive, then there’s downright saccharine. Martin’s vapid tale of a young husband who will go to the ends of the earth to grant his dying wife her final wish is a work of unabashed romanticism and heartbreaking sadness that requires readers to suspend disbelief and simply ride the high current of emotion. When starving artist Doss Michaels interrupts the rape-in-progress of supermodel Abbie Coleman in a Charleston park, he sets in motion a fairy-tale love story. Then, a decade into their storybook marriage, during a year spent visiting European art galleries, thanks to five-figure commissions for Doss, Abbie discovers a lump in her breast, the herald of virulent cancer. With seemingly only days left to live, she makes Doss fulfill a promise to repeat their honeymoon trip canoeing down a river in the wilds of Georgia. The arduous journey is rife with Deliverance-style malevolence as Doss and Abby fight off would-be gang rapists (again!), dodge a hurricane, and employ a bush pilot and defrocked priest to help them. Martin’s jejune and hackneyed sixth novel is being touted as his “mainstream debut,” and it may well appeal to fans of Nicholas Sparks, Robert James Waller, and Richard Paul Evans. --Carol Haggas--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.