Anne Rice's older sister debuts with a historical, set in ninth-century Europe at the time of Charlemagne, chronicling the rise of Christianity and resistance to the Northern worshippers of Odin. After Elin of the Forest People and Owen, 23-year-old bishop of Chantalon, save each other's lives, Elin chooses to bond to Owen as his wife. But when she tells him that she's pregnant from having been raped many times over, his anger floods, then abates when he sees himself as the spiritual father of any child Elin bears. Elin, however, wants revenge on her despoilers, the Vikings, who have decided to winter on an island near Chantalon and have built themselves a stout longhouse and a hall. Meanwhile, Owen's bishopric is in ruins, stripped of its wealth by its lordan old, lecherous, drunken, and cowardly count who buys off the Vikings with his people's harvests and savings. Elin offers Owen the services of the Forest People, a supernatural race with no fear of anyone, even though Owen sees them as mere pagans who follow witchcraft. Nonetheless, when the count's leading henchman, Gerlos, meets Owen in battle and the two fall into a blazing fire, only Owen emerges unburned, causing his people to consider him a saint. Later, after Owen is captured by the Northmen, Elin becomes mistress of Chantalon and its chief defender. Three energies lift, or try to lift, the novel: its descriptions of battle, with flying axes and hacked flesh; its supernatural overlay, with Owen haloed against death and with a storm called down by Elin to drown the Northmen; and the effortful love behind scenes that often sound sucked from Rice's pseudonymous sex trilogy: ``He was not in, but within her, and she unfolded herself to him as the petals of a flower open to the sun. They drifted together on a golden river of joy.'' Overall, though: a saga densely detailed, rich, and gripping.
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-94046-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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