A touching and sometimes-chilling survivor’s tale.
A grad student dates a debonair doctor with a dark side in this historical novel.
Just after World War II, Claire Wagner is excited to be in Berkeley, California, on scholarship to get her master’s in social work. She worked hard for her achievements, growing up in a Chicago housing project with a German immigrant mother after her father abandoned the family early on. Claire’s brother, Tom, now based in the Bay Area, sets her up on a blind date with Greg Lombard, whom he met at a local gym. Greg turns out to be a handsome thoracic surgeon in his late 30s. He takes her to fancy restaurants, which she enjoys despite his tendency to order for her. She also likes Greg’s kisses, but his controlling ways soon escalate, and he eventually falsely accuses her of sleeping with a doctor at a nearby hospital where she has an internship. After Claire ends the relationship, Greg stalks her, even following her when she visits New York City, where her mother and her second husband now live. Upon return to California, Claire gets a restraining order, but Greg proves unrelenting. Eventually, a horribly violent encounter changes her life. Overall, this is an accomplished first novel. Memoirist Rene (Becoming Alice, 2008) notes that it’s “inspired by true events,” and it’s infused with authenticity, from the mouthwatering mentions of German cuisine (such as the small sausages known as Würstchen) to the pre-feminist commentary when Claire focuses on her studies and career aspirations instead of romance. Rene also weaves engaging social work cases into the narrative, underscoring Claire’s passion for her profession. Although Greg’s villainy is a bit over-the-top (among other things, he’s routinely abusive to patients and gets hit with a malpractice suit), he’s sadly not outside the realm of possibility.
A touching and sometimes-chilling survivor’s tale.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9969490-0-2
Page Count: 300
Publisher: California Country Press
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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