Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Book Summary and Reviews of Fiona Range by Mary McGarry Morris

Fiona Range by Mary McGarry Morris

Fiona Range

by Mary McGarry Morris

  • Critics' Consensus (0):
  • Readers' Rating (1):
  • Published:
  • May 2000, 400 pages
  • Rate this book

About this book

Book Summary

Morris returns with Fiona Range, a powerful story about a promiscuous woman trying to get her life in order. Raised by a prominent aunt and uncle near Boston, thirty-year-old Fiona Range has developed a high threshold for emotional pain. Her recklessness, generosity, and poor judgment have landed her in more scrapes than her well-bred family--or small-town community--can tolerate.

Beautiful, volatile, and smart tongued (or trashy, erratic, and wild, depending on whom you ask), Fiona hits rock bottom with a strange man in her bed after a hapless end to a party. Determined to change, Fiona is certain she fits in somewhere beyond the disapproving family her unwed mother abandoned her to. Maybe comfort lies with Patrick Grady--the scowling Vietnam veteran, scarred in face and soul, her rumored father who wants absolutely nothing to do with her. Undeterred by this dangerous man's threats and angered by the warnings of family and friends, she begins to pursue him.... Fiona Range is the compelling story of goodness undermined by guilt, of perilous obsession, and of the twisted bond of betrayal committed in the name of love.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"Fiona's headlong self-destruction distance her from the reader's sympathy. Yet there is sustained tension in the narrative, and the denouement packs a thriller's excitement." - Publishers Weekly.

"Morris is in complete charge of her hardscrabble literary territory and Fiona is without question her most complicated, compelling character to date." - Entertainment Weekly.

"As readable as its heroine is compulsive, this is the kind of book that makes you stay up half the night." - The New Yorker.

"A fascinating portrait of a woman whose instinctive sense of mystery about herself leads her to uncover that secret at all costs." - The Chicago Tribune.

"Although slow moving at times, the ending, with its twist of plot and hidden secrets revealed, makes this a worthy read." - Booklist.

"Morris has a wonderful ear for dialogue and, here, presents us with a complex, compelling character. But, ultimately, this soap operalike tale is repetitive and the answers to those secrets are hardly surprising." - Kirkus Reviews.

"She can bring the ordinary to life with the sheer clarity of vision. She knows how a house with children in it sounds at night, what the heat and bustle in a kitchen feel like before a family dinner and how indiscretions arise in a dining room when everyone is flushed with wine." - New York Times Book Review.

This information about Fiona Range was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

Write your own reviewwrite your own review

Temiloluwa Lawal

Never underestimate the power of luck
Fiona was someone you never think could be great until luck found her.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Mary McGarry Morris Author Biography

Photo: Author website

Mary McGarry Morris was born in Meriden, Connecticut in 1943 and raised in Rutland, Vermont with three younger brothers. She was educated at Mount Saint Joseph Academy in Rutland, the University of Vermont, and the University of Massachusetts.

Her first novel Vanished was published in 1988. It was nominated for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. A Dangerous Woman was published in 1991 and was chosen by Time magazine as one of the "Five Best Novels of the Year." It was made into a motion picture starring Debra Winger, Barbara Hershey, and Gabriel Byrne. Songs In Ordinary Time was published in 1995. Two years later, it was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection, which propelled it to the top of the New York Times bestsellers list for many weeks, as well as making ...

... Full Biography
Link to Mary McGarry Morris's Website

Other books by Mary McGarry Morris at BookBrowse
  • The Last Secret jacket

7 more...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more literary fiction...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
  • Book Jacket: The Women
    The Women
    by Kristin Hannah
    Kristin Hannah's latest historical epic, The Women, is a story of how a war shaped a generation ...
  • Book Jacket: The Wide Wide Sea
    The Wide Wide Sea
    by Hampton Sides
    By 1775, 48-year-old Captain James Cook had completed two highly successful voyages of discovery and...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.