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PRETTY IS AS PRETTY DOES

Name: PRETTY IS AS PRETTY DOES
Author: Alison Clement
ISBN: 1-9673701-9-1

by Alison Clement ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2001

As self-righteous and narrow-minded as the small-town characters it vilifies.

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All hell breaks loose when a silly young woman falls for a stranger passing through her claustrophobically small Illinois town.

Lucy Fooshee, Palmyra’s beauty queen, has married Bob Bybee, son of Palmyra’s second-richest farmer. Two weeks after the wedding, she enters Aunt Babe’s Café for lunch, and finds Babe’s nephew Billy working the counter while he visits the town. Their case of lust at first sight is not calmed by the fact that Billy also works as a handyman at Lucy’s mother’s house, where Lucy and Bob have dinner nightly, or the fact that Bob and his family are despicable. First-time novelist Clement, a Colorado-based elementary school librarian, clearly wants us to see Lucy as immature yet endearing, but her Lucy is spoiled and bratty. As she chases after Billy, readers are likely to find their sympathies sliding unexpectedly toward the boorish but besotted Bob. Lucy and Billy end up at the Holiday Inn in Springfield, then begin meeting regularly behind the cemetery. Everyone except Bob knows about the affair, the scandal heightened by the news that Billy is one quarter “Injun.” After Billy is run out of town (shades of watered-down Tennessee Williams), Lucy discovers she's pregnant, the locals burn crosses on her lawn, and Bob’s family rejects her. Lucy and her new baby head off in her divorce-settlement Cadillac, supposedly toward a new life of possibilities. Clement’s sense of time and place are wobbly; she never clarifies when the story takes place. Certain references, like a comparison of Lucy to Elizabeth Taylor, along with the backwardness and isolation of Palmyra’s citizens (despite living within easy driving distance of the relatively sophisticated state capital, Springfield) imply the ’50s but other touches, such as a Mexican restaurant that serves authentic chicken tacos, implies the present. And although the story's set is Illinois, Lucy narrates with a decidedly southern accent (and with grammar so bad it sounds forced).

As self-righteous and narrow-minded as the small-town characters it vilifies.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001

ISBN: 1-9673701-9-1

Page Count: 300

Publisher: MacAdam/Cage

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001

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.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.