A complex and unsentimental portrait of a young woman confronting the searingly painful memories that constitute her identity—in a first novel from storywriter Moore (Small Spaces Between Emergencies, 1992). Narrator-photographer Matty Grover is spending the summer in the Arizona desert with only a neighbor—fiercely free-spirited, antisocial sculptor Della Wolff—for occasional company. In the solitude, memories resurface. Matty recalls her mother's death from cancer when she was in eighth grade. And how when her mother died, her father cracked. He summoned Jack, a grown son from an earlier marriage (of which Matty was unaware), then sneaked out of the house and away from their small Virginia town. Jack stuck around for a while; Matty, in the quiet but desperate throes of mourning, developed a crush on him. But he had business obligations in Arizona, so Matty was shunted off to board with an aging church organist. Later, a relationship with Ben, an epileptic and piano virtuoso, offered attachment but not consolation. So she bought a bus ticket and went, uninvited, to Arizona to move in with Jack, who was laconically kind but preoccupied with his own love affair. After even more troubling discoveries about her father, Matty shoved off, on her own, for California. Poignant moments abound here: of watching from a window while her family's possessions are sold at a yard sale, of arriving at her father's deathbed 20 minutes too late, of running away from home while her mother was in the hospital, of being raped. Yet this is by no means an all-gloomy ride. Matty always has an eye for beauty amid horror and an ability (compulsion?) to keep moving. Her deeply felt summer-long requiem paves the way for artistic—and possibly even psychic—freedom. A first-novelist's surefooted and affecting examination of abandonment's scars.
Pub Date: June 5, 1995
ISBN: 1-56279-074-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose...
Sparks (The Longest Ride, 2013, etc.) serves up another heaping helping of sentimental Southern bodice-rippage.
Gone are the blondes of yore, but otherwise the Sparks-ian formula is the same: a decent fellow from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches falls in love with a decent girl from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches—and is still suffering the consequences. The guy is innately intelligent but too quick to throw a punch, the girl beautiful and scary smart. If you hold a fatalistic worldview, then you’ll know that a love between them can end only in tears. If you hold a Sparks-ian one, then true love will prevail, though not without a fight. Voilà: plug in the character names, and off the story goes. In this case, Colin Hancock is the misunderstood lad who’s decided to reform his hard-knuckle ways but just can’t keep himself from connecting fist to face from time to time. Maria Sanchez is the dedicated lawyer in harm’s way—and not just because her boss is a masher. Simple enough. All Colin has to do is punch the partner’s lights out: “The sexual harassment was bad enough, but Ken was a bully as well, and Colin knew from his own experience that people like that didn’t stop abusing their power unless someone made them. Or put the fear of God into them.” No? No, because bound up in Maria’s story, wrinkled with the doings of an equally comely sister, there’s a stalker and a closet full of skeletons. Add Colin’s back story, and there’s a perfect couple in need of constant therapy, as well as a menacing cop. Get Colin and Maria to smooching, and the plot thickens as the storylines entangle. Forget about love—can they survive the evil that awaits them out in the kudzu-choked woods?
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose corn syrup, stickily sweet but irresistible.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2061-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
The previous books of this author (Devil of a State, 1962; The Right to an Answer, 1961) had valid points of satire, some humor, and a contemporary view, but here the picture is all out—from a time in the future to an argot that makes such demands on the reader that no one could care less after the first two pages.
If anyone geta beyond that—this is the first person story of Alex, a teen-age hoodlum, who, in step with his times, viddies himself and the world around him without a care for law, decency, honesty; whose autobiographical language has droogies to follow his orders, wallow in his hate and murder moods, accents the vonof human hole products. Betrayed by his dictatorial demands by a policing of his violence, he is committed when an old lady dies after an attack; he kills again in prison; he submits to a new method that will destroy his criminal impulses; blameless, he is returned to a world that visits immediate retribution on him; he is, when an accidental propulsion to death does not destroy him, foisted upon society once more in his original state of sin.
What happens to Alex is terrible but it is worse for the reader.
Pub Date: Jan. 8, 1962
ISBN: 0393928098
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1962
SEEN & HEARD
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