Getting It Right
A Novel
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- £8.49
Publisher Description
Getting It Right is the story of Kara and Alex, half-sisters who have never met―one the product of an abusive foster-care setting, the other of dysfunctional privilege. Haunted by crippling memories, Kara falls for the wrong men, tries to help her foster-care siblings suffering from PTSD, and longs for the father and half-sister she only knows from a photograph. Alex, meanwhile, struggles to keep her younger sisters out of trouble, her mother sane, and her marketing business afloat.
Now Alex has a new responsibility: from his hospital bed, her father tasks her with finding Kara, the mixed-race child he abandoned. Alex is stunned to learn of Kara's existence but reluctantly agrees.
To make things more complicated, Kara loves a married man whom the FBI is pursuing for insider trading. When Alex eventually finds her half-sister, she becomes embroiled in Kara's dangers, which threaten to drag them both down. If Kara doesn't help the FBI, she could face prosecution and possible incarceration, and if Alex can't persuade Kara to meet their father, she will let him down during the final days of his life.
Set in Harlem, the Bronx, and the wealthy community of Bedford, New York, during two weeks in March, Getting It Right explores grit and resilience, evolving definitions of race and family, and the ultimate power of redemption and forgiveness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Author, columnist and National Review founder Buckley offers a sentimental bildungsroman about a young man's initiation into the mid-century American conservative movement. In 1956, a 19-year-old Mormon missionary, Woodroe Raynor, is assigned to fieldwork in Austria, near the Hungarian border. He loses his virginity to a Hungarian woman and is wounded as he watches Russian tanks quell the Hungarian uprising. The bullet wound is nothing, however, compared to the psychic pain of learning that his paramour is a Communist sympathizer. Woodroe later attends Princeton and begins working for the John Birch Society. He has a love affair with an Ayn Rand acolyte, leading to some heady epistolary debates about whether Rand or Birch Society founder Robert Welch is better prepared to eradicate Communism. Rand is unmasked (yet again) as a sexually and intellectually manipulative egomaniac, and the wisdom of the National Review and its staff is affirmed regularly. Vivid historical passages about the Cuban missile crisis and the Kennedy assassination, as well as cameo appearances by John Dos Passos and Alan Greenspan, are a welcome diversion from the mostly stilted prose (a sex scene between Rand and a lover is described this way: "Today her lover was being welcomed with synaesthetical concern for all the senses.... But as he lay and later groaned with writhing and release, he brought the full force of his mind to transmuted, voluptarian elation in this physical union..."). Between the self-congratulatory tone and the flat characters, the novel will appeal primarily to Buckley's devoted fans.
