AT NODDER BUTTE

Name: AT NODDER BUTTE
Author: John Mogan
ISBN: 978-1-4251-6975-6

by John Mogan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2008

An atmospheric ride, brief but realized, with a sure, discomforting hand at portent and a quicksilver administration of the...

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Otherworldly happenings are afoot when a Native American shaman withdraws from his calling in Mogan’s novel.

A butte rises 300 feet out of the soft-sand desert of the American Southwest. At its scorching foot sits a weather station where Tom has taken meteorological readings for the past six years, and where the Weather Bureau has posted Robin, a recent college graduate. Robin is a woman and a tad defensive in the male-dominated world of the service, but anxious to make her mark at a post that most people shun as too brutally desolate. Tom unnerves her at first, a calm but reticent gentleman who has a line of Navajo seers in his blood, though he has distanced himself from that life. He has an uncanny talent for describing the land during his weather reports; these can be somewhat fruity—“The east and west are like the edges of a giant ladle in which the liquid energy of the light pours”—but more frequently sharp in the mind’s eye: “As the sun sinks lower, each grain of sand casts a shadow on the next.” In writing that echoes the milieu—sere, elemental (“the moon was full—daylight without depth”) and touched with an ominous foreboding, like a bad omen sits just over the horizon—Tom encourages Robin, who is both drawn to the desert and finds it ungraspable, to meld with the land, invite it inside her and give herself over to it. As they grow more at ease with one another, and despite the strange episodes in the nighttime when Tom sleepwalks and Robin sees apocalyptic reflections in his fixed stare, they explore the butte together, there to find both the sacred and the profane, and to unleash a force from deepest history that will be their undoing.

An atmospheric ride, brief but realized, with a sure, discomforting hand at portent and a quicksilver administration of the surreal.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-1-4251-6975-6

Page Count: 130

Publisher: Trafford

Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2010

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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MAGIC HOUR

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

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Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.

Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

Pub Date: March 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-345-46752-3

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.