Well crafted if unsurprising.
In a competent first outing, a young woman’s search for her brother among environmental malcontents in New Mexico becomes a quest to find herself.
Lynn Fleming is sleepwalking her way through a Brooklyn summer when her mother demands she come home to rescue her brother from the “Eco-freaks” who have turned him against her. Lynn’s own life is on hold. Her grant money for a neglected dissertation on feminist artists of the ’60s and ’70s is about to dry up, and her affair with Michael, her gadfly married advisor, has hit the skids except for his occasional late night appearances “reeking sweetly of gallery wine.” To Lynn’s credit, given the choice of Albuquerque or Michael’s last-minute invite to Paris, she heads home to the Southwest, her widowed mother, her “lost” brother, Wylie, and the city she hates. She’s soon irrevocably involved in Wylie’s politics and his apartment mates. Her affair with one of the main Eco-pranksters, Angus Beam, leads to her participation in the group’s plots to drain private swimming pools (a waste of water) and close down access to the mountains outside the city (to create a wilderness area), while her mother carries on a blatant affair with David, the married lawyer who lived next door to the Flemings in their old neighborhood. Add to this chaos the mystery of the two sexually provocative paintings by a 1970s artist named Eva Kent that Lynn rediscovers in her mother’s condo. A Pandora’s box of disturbing questions fly out. Was her mother having an affair with David when her father was alive? Where did her father get these paintings? Did he have an affair with Eva Kent, who had a child, lost her mind, and destroyed all her work? The plot lines converge in tragic and comic ways until Lynn struggles out from underneath the confusion, faces the past and is able to move on to her future.
Well crafted if unsurprising.Pub Date: May 6, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-41524-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
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
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
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