In all these stories, love and goodness ultimately win out, but the charming details and bittersweet human cost are what...
In these five long stories, McCall Smith (The Revolving Door of Life, 2016, etc.) imagines the worlds he has glimpsed in the black-and-white photographs he shares with the reader.
“Sister Flora’s First Day of Freedom” opens with the volume’s most compelling photograph: the back of a woman about to step out of a shaft of light, “at the point where an old life was consigned to the past and an entirely different life was being embarked upon.” Having inherited some money and quit her convent, Flora arrives in Edinburgh to find a husband. Her tart matter-of-factness keeps the mood of possibility and good fortune from turning cloying. “Angels in Italy” opens with an elderly Scottish woman in Italy showing a young man a photo of herself as a young girl leading a smaller girl on a pony beside an unhappy-looking boy on a bike. That boy grew up to become a famous painter, the subject of a magazine profile the young man is writing. The old woman tells the story of her complicated relationship with the artist, and the young man writes it down “exactly how it happened.” There are three people in the “Dear Ventriloquist” photo: a woman, the man sitting on her lap, and “the person behind the camera.” This portrait of a mild love triangle in a Canadian traveling circus is feather-light. So is “The Woman with the Beautiful Car.” The 1907 Standard Tourer belongs to the woman facing the camera, while two men change its tire. She is a young Irish heiress, one of the men the village teacher. Their meet-cute romance is a snapshot of man-made coincidence involving tacks. “He Wanted to Believe in Tenderness,” with its picture of a smiling soldier beside a woman whose expression is enigmatic, challenges McCall Smith’s generally sunny outlook. The story includes both a grim prisoner-of-war experience and three marital betrayals.
In all these stories, love and goodness ultimately win out, but the charming details and bittersweet human cost are what resonate.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87125-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A luminous collection that mines the mundane as cannily as the fantastic and extraterrestrial.
From the author of A Wrinkle in Time, 18 gemlike stories ranging from the small heartbreaks of childhood to the discovery of life on a new planet
In these stories, some previously published and others appearing for the first time in this collection, L’Engle explores family dynamics, loneliness, and the pains of growing up. In “Summer Camp,” children show a stunning capacity for cruelty, as when one writes an imploring letter to a lost friend only to witness that friend mocking the letter in front of their bunkmates; in “Madame, Or...” a brother finds his sister at a finishing school with a sordid underbelly and is unable to convince her to leave. L’Engle employs rhythm and repetition to great effect in multiple stories—the same gray cat seems to appear in “Gilberte Must Play Bach” and “Madame, Or...”—and sometimes even in the language of a single sentence: “The piano stood in the lamplight, lamplight shining through burnt shades, red candles in the silver candlesticks...red wax drippings on the base of the candlesticks.” Occasionally, emotional undertones flow over, as in the protagonist’s somewhat saccharine goodbye to her Southern home in “White in the Moon the Long Road Lies.” Overall, though, the stories seem to peer at strong emotions from the corner of the eye, and humor dances in and out of the tales. “A Foreign Agent” sees a mother and daughter in battle over the daughter’s glasses, which have come to represent the bridge between childhood and adulthood when the mother’s literary agent begins to pursue the daughter. On another planet, a higher life form makes a joke via code: The visitors will be “quartered—housed, that is, of course, not drawn and quartered.” While there is levity, many of these stories end with characters undecided, straddling a nostalgic past and an unsettled future. Although written largely throughout the 1940s and '50s, L’Engle’s lucid explorations of relationships make her writing equally accessible today.
A luminous collection that mines the mundane as cannily as the fantastic and extraterrestrial.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1782-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Not just for ghost addicts.
A collection of pleasantly creepy stories follows Hill’s debut novel (Heart Shaped Box, 2007).
Published in a number of magazines from 2001 to the present, most of the stories display the unself-conscious dash that made Hill’s novel an intelligent pleasure. In addition to the touches of the supernatural, some heavy, some light, the stories are largely united by Hill’s mastery of teenaged-male guilt and anxiety, unrelieved by garage-band success or ambition. One of the longest and best, “Voluntary Committal,” is about Nolan, a guilty, anxious high-school student, Morris, his possibly autistic or perhaps just congenitally strange little brother, and Eddie, Nolan’s wild but charming friend. Morris, whose problems dominate but don’t completely derail his family’s life, spends the bulk of his time in the basement creating intricate worlds out of boxes. Eddie and Nolan spend their time in accepted slacker activities until Eddie, whose home life is rough, starts pushing the edges, leading to real mischief, a big problem for Nolan who would rather stay within the law. It’s Morris who removes the problem for the big brother he loves, guaranteeing perpetual guilt and anxiety for Nolan. “My Father’s Mask” is a surprisingly romantic piece about a small, clever family whose weekend in an inherited country place involves masks, time travel and betrayal. The story least reliant on the supernatural may leave the most readers pining for a full-length treatment: “Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead” reunites a funny but failed standup comedian with his equally funny ex-high school sweetheart Harriet, now married and a mother. Bobby has come back to Pittsburgh, tail between his legs, substitute teaching and picking up the odd acting job, and it is on one of those gigs, a low-budget horror film, that the couple reconnects, falling into their old comedic rhythms.
Not just for ghost addicts.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-114797-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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