This collection introduces to fiction a 50ish newcomer who's previously written four children's books and worked as a literary agent. The experience shows. Divided into three neat sections, these stories place Thomas in the coterie of popular female authors that includes Alice Adams, Mary Gordon, Alice Hoffman, and Bobbie Ann Mason. Part One concerns children from charmingly dysfunctional families. The settings and values of the 1950s are captured to perfection, as when the shamed, divorced, or never-married mothers whose teenage children apply too much makeup are juxtaposed with neighbors who have turned their basements into rec rooms in ``1957.'' The four stories in the second section depict women's boredom during roughly the same time period. All revolve around Virginia, thrown out of college the moment she became pregnant, attempting to adjust to her husband and his friends. In these low-key pieces we meet characters already defeated. As the experienced ex- girlfriend puts it: ``The thing about being married is you spend all day waiting for your husband to come home and when he does, it's no big deal.'' But these losers at times show endearingly zany sides—Buddy, for example, draws with magic marker on Virginia's huge stomach. If the middle decades of this century were repressed, all hell breaks loose in the 1980s (Part Three). Enter Louise, a sex-crazed woman approaching menopause, mother of four, twice divorced, who sets her sights continually on the wrong men: a dentist who wishes only to cap her teeth, a 20-year- old construction worker, a former lover, a drug dealer/street musician she barely knows. The only disappointing piece is the final, title story. Here Louise loses her human traits and becomes a gimmicky muse stand-in, telling the writer what to say, or interrupting to explain how it really happened. Despite the disconcerting finish, a powerful collection.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-56512-024-8
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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