by Bill Wittliff ; illustrated by Jack Unruh ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2014
An unpretentious but smart reboot of Wild West storytelling.
A Texas boy goes searching for his missing momma in an endearing picaresque that evokes Huckleberry Finn, Don Quixote and a whole passel of folk tales.
The narrator of this extended shaggy dog story, the first in a series, is Papa, who’s recalling his boyhood in central Texas in the 1880s. His mother has escaped the clutches of his domineering father, Old Karl, and Papa is quickly separated not just from both parents but from his brother as well. So begins the oldest story ever told—a youngster heads off on a journey—but the familiarity of the novel's setup is countered by the rounded, quirky, sometimes-creepy characters Papa encounters and the warmth of Wittliff’s down-home prose. The secondary cast includes Papa’s newborn half brother, whose bird-shaped birthmark holds an oracular power for those around him; Fritz, a stray dog with a strange laughing bark; Calley, a cowboy who’s at once a walking essay in conditional ethics and a father figure to the boy; and Pepe and Peto, Mexican laborers who’ve also escaped Old Karl’s heavy hand. Wittliff, who’s written screenplays for Lonesome Dove and Legends of the Fall, knows his Texas tropes backward and forward. Some of those tropes are overly familiar, and characters tend to appear and disappear in ways that strain credulity. But here too Wittliff knows what he's doing: The novel is less a grab bag of episodes and symbols (though it is that) than a sophisticated consideration of interconnectedness, an idea he tinkers with on practical and metaphysical levels. The elliptical story climaxes at the ridge of the novel’s title, giving the book the feel of an old-fashioned cliffhanger in its closing pages. Wittliff’s Huck-ish voice sometimes runs on a bit long, but he’s a font of well-told wisdom, and Unruh’s illustrations show key moments in the story with appropriately warped perspective and detail.
An unpretentious but smart reboot of Wild West storytelling.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-292-75995-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
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
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