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CALLED OUT

Name: CALLED OUT
Author: A.G. Mojtabai
ISBN: 0-385-47430-X

by A.G. Mojtabai ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1994

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When a passenger jet crashes near the desolate Texas town of Bounds, tragedy links the lives of victims and townspeople, forcing the citizens of an insular community to confront a world on which most turned their backs long ago. An unnamed, out-of-town newspaper reporter pinpoints the novel's narrative technique while musing on the unreliability of conflicting eyewitness accounts of the crash: ``That's how it always is with one event seen through different windows.'' The windows Mojtabai (Ordinary Time, 1989, etc.) constructs are monologues through which three main witnesses tell their stories in alternating chapters, interrupted occasionally by minor characters. After the reporter, the two other main witnesses are Father Mark, the town's Catholic priest, and Glenna Wooten, the town's postmaster. Their folksy, colloquial speech, meant to be both poetic and sensible, is what we expect from these familiar salt-of-the-earth types (hardy, defiant, proud of their simplicity and bedrock values), and it contributes greatly to the novel's tensionless, conversational feel and to the blurry uniformity of the characters. From the moment the plane crashes, the focus is on the townspeople; the victims—initially, gory corpses and the ghostly walking wounded; later, the survivors and relatives of those who died—seem curiously incidental. The plot's only conflict develops late: To accommodate the flood of survivors and relatives drawn to the crash site, Father Mark keeps the church open night and day. Members of the parish council, upset by the increased cost of utilities, challenge the priest by asking, ``Whose church is this, anyway?'' The question we are meant to ponder is whether a brotherhood of man unites us, whether some larger human connection makes these outsiders neighbors rather than strangers. Mojtabai's fragmented narrative offers no definitive answers, but her writing is occasionally powerful in the dead-on rightness of isolated images and in its evocation of the fascination catastrophe holds. (Author tour)

Pub Date: June 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-385-47430-X

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Nan A. Talese

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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DISTANT SHORES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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.