Braver (Divine Sarah, 2004) makes an ambitious attempt to examine how accidents harden into fate and tries to coordinate too...
A second’s inattention changes the shape of a woman’s life.
Claire Andrews is a well-respected van Gogh scholar and newly single university professor. Her life has a predictable pattern: teaching, researching, socializing with a few close friends. If she isn’t exactly going through the motions, she is at the very least treading a well-worn path, but after she strikes and kills a young boy with her car, the comfortable order of her world is permanently altered. Perhaps more disorienting than the accident itself are the responses it elicits. Claire’s university, anxious about bad publicity, wishes her to take a leave; her neighbors cannot meet her eye; and the boy’s family sues for wrongful death. In the midst of her trauma, Claire finds two bright spots: her estranged husband’s unexpectedly loyal response to her grief; and her own newfound curiosity about the last days of van Gogh’s life when he painted Crows Over the Wheatfield. Braver’s novel moves between Claire’s struggle to cope with the disintegration of her personal life in the wake of the accident, and a research trip to France during which she discovers new information about van Gogh. In both narratives, Claire is attuned to the significance of single moments in which the world and our perceptions of it can change in momentous and irreversible ways. Despite the care with which the author alternates between Claire’s scholarly and personal trials, a strategy echoed in the novel’s switching between passages about van Gogh’s trauma and Claire’s suffering, the juxtaposition can be both facile and jarring. The self-discoveries Claire makes in France have a formulaic, scripted quality that makes Claire unlikable and unbelievable. Prone to uttering sophomoric platitudes about art and life, Claire seems more concussed than introspective after her accident, a matter not helped by the stilted quality of the characters’ dialogue.
Braver (Divine Sarah, 2004) makes an ambitious attempt to examine how accidents harden into fate and tries to coordinate too many stories, yet he has no central character strong enough to synthesize them.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-078232-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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
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
© 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.
