JULIET IN AUGUST

Name: JULIET IN AUGUST
Author: Dianne Warren
ISBN: 978-0-399-15799-8

by Dianne Warren ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 5, 2012

The low-key narrative takes a while to build enough momentum to sustain reader interest, but once immersed in its leisurely...

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Winner of the 2010 Governor General’s Award, Warren’s U.S. debut limns two nights and a single summer day in a tiny Canadian town.

In spare, quietly lyrical prose, Warren tracks the inhabitants of several households in Juliet (population 1,011). Lee Torgeson, 26, isn’t sure he’s capable of managing the farm left to him by his adoptive parents. Willard Shoenfeld and his brother’s widow, Marian, share a home and continue to run the Desert Drive-In movie theater, but Willard is afraid Marian is planning to leave; he can’t admit to himself how much he loves her, and he’s unaware she shares those feelings. Blaine Dolson has lost most of his family’s farmland and faces bankruptcy; he’s maddened by the distracted, easygoing ways of wife Vicki, who seems to let their six children mostly run wild. Blaine is only one of the borrowers whose on-the-brink finances worry tenderhearted banker Norval Birch, who is also troubled by wife Lila’s plans for an elaborate wedding for their pregnant daughter Rachelle. Add to this mix an out-of-towner who has lost the Arabian horse she impulsively bought en route to see her formerly estranged daughter and the grandchildren she’s never met; good-natured trucker Hank Trass, who takes her cell number and promises to keep an eye out; his jealous wife, Lynn, who finds the number and is sure Hank is cheating; plus the local hairdresser, whose cousin stabbed his own mother and whose father is a drunk—it adds up to the traditional cast of quirky characters that frequently animate tales of small-town life. Warren gives it her own twist with humor as dry as the sand dunes of the Little Snake Hills that border Juliet and with gentle compassion for her characters, who have their share of troubles but are all essentially decent, caring folks.

The low-key narrative takes a while to build enough momentum to sustain reader interest, but once immersed in its leisurely rhythms, most will find this an engaging snapshot of rural life.

Pub Date: July 5, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-399-15799-8

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Amy Einhorn/Putnam

Review Posted Online: June 30, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.

Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946

ISBN: 0452277507

Page Count: 114

Publisher: Harcourt, Brace

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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GEORGE ORWELL
by George Orwell ; edited by Peter Davison

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DIARIES
by George Orwell & edited by Peter Davison

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ALL ART IS PROPAGANDA
by George Orwell

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.