bookshelf

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.

bookshelf

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

bookshelf

BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

bookshelf

Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

bookshelf

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

bookshelf

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.