Altogether a delight to savor.
The spirit of play is at work in this lively latest crop of Southern stories gamely chosen by fiction-writer Gurganus (The Practical Heart, 2001, etc.), whose own work has appeared in the series.
Skillful vernacular storytelling and writing with heart mark many of these selections, such as R.T. Smith’s “Tastes Like Chicken,” which imagines the entrancing, albeit lonely livelihood of a snake-catcher whose wife eventually leaves him for a larger (and less menacing) life. Nanci Kincaid’s “The Currency of Love” depicts beautifully a prickly relationship between a mother hospitalized for a breast biopsy and her divorced daughter, while Daniel Wallace’s “Justice” hilariously evokes the biblical sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham in a story about a father’s decision to kill his son for taking the last tissue in the box. Two stories about dogs prove surprisingly moving: Wendell Berry’s “Mike” describes the transcendent convergence of a farmer, his land and his dog; and Mary Helen Stefaniak’s “You Love That Dog” tracks a troubled marriage through the husband’s decision to shoot his beloved dog because he keeps running away. Keith Lee Morris’s unusual “Tired Heart” is an elegiac sojourn from South Carolina to Puget Sound in the voice of a young married man hired to transport parcels for an anonymous, increasingly exacting employer. J.D. Chapman’s “Amanuensis” touchingly renders the inner life of a tubercular war vet in 1917 moved to a hospital in North Carolina, and Cary Holladay’s “The Burning” envisions the horrific fate of an 18th-century Virginia slave burned at the stake for the murder of her master. Gurganus maintains a buoyant mix of gravitas and levity, and in his tongue-in-cheek introduction, lists the kinds of stories with stock “Southerly” ingredients that he has spared the reader, i.e., those with arbitrary phonetic spelling, village interaction, impending gun violence, pan-generational sex, “plus a traffic-pile-up run-on-sentence construction lacking any Faulknerian suspension-bridge engineering.”
Altogether a delight to savor.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2006
ISBN: 1-56512-531-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
