A remarkably sweet and affecting tale of inner growth.
Unlucky-in-love Manhattan art conservationist faces her biggest fear when called upon to deliver a speech at a family event.
Despite having one of the coolest jobs in the universe—restoring paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—Hope McNeill has a low-grade case of the blues. Woefully mismatched with her conservative hedge-fund-manager boyfriend Evan, and distracted by a debilitating crush on an attractively aloof (and spoken for) colleague, she feels, at 31, like a passive observer in her own life. Her greatest source of comfort, other than repeatedly watching her favorite Zoloft commercial on TV, is escaping to Central Park’s Pug Hill. A bucolic gathering spot for owners of the breed, Pug Hill stands for all things good and positive to Hope, and the fact that she goes there without a dog of her own helps push the point that she is due for a change. And change she gets when her parents ask her to give a speech at their 40th anniversary party on Long Island. Paralyzed by even the thought of public speaking, but not wanting to let her family down, she says yes. As if that pressure was not enough, Hope’s older, prettier, spoiled sister Darcy will also be there with her beau, C.P. (Crested Possum), an affected young man with Native-American pretensions who is trying to convince Darcy to move to a commune. To prepare herself, Hope enrolls in a public-speaking class at The New School. There she bonds with her eccentric classmates, as well as the requisite hot guy, and comes to terms with some of the neuroses and bad habits that have kept her yearning for far too long. Along the way, she learns to forgive her family and herself and finds her confidence. Pace (If Andy Warhol Had a Girlfriend, 2005) has invented an emotionally complex and winning heroine, even if the long, loving descriptions of pugs might try the reader’s patience.
A remarkably sweet and affecting tale of inner growth.Pub Date: May 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-425-20971-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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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