A wide-ranging yet monochrome collection of rhyming poems.
A debut volume of poetry celebrates life in America.
Many a poet has been inspired to write by the beauty of the American West. Tidwell stands proudly among them: “When you experience the grandeur of the Rockies / You will find a peace nothing else can achieve / The valleys and snowcapped peaks paint a picture / That will continually make your memories richer.” The first section of this collection features many praises of Western landscapes as well as selections like “The Lawman” and “The Sheriff” that effectively evoke the long tradition of cowboy poetry. But the author’s verse touches on many topics: Subsequent sections include poems on travel, friendship, loss, and the many emotions related to love. There is an entire section dedicated to Tidwell’s patriotic feelings, with poems about 9/11, military service, and the country’s growing partisan divide. He finds inspiration in quotidian tasks as well, as in this vivid, unexpectedly melancholic poem about doing laundry post-divorce: “Finding out she wasn’t happy meant ending this show / That’s how I ended up in the town of Durango / Doing laundry just once a week is now something, I hate / 10 sets of socks, shorts and t shirts is such an ugly state.” There is an antiquated quality to the work, both in terms of form and content. (The first poem, a romantic ode to the Native Americans of the West, is called “Red Brothers.”) The poems are almost all composed of quatrains featuring AABB end rhymes. But Tidwell is not a counter of syllables and his meter tends to be all over the place, as in “Cousin Peggy”: “The mother of four, business owner and much more / Teaching her kids to seek the truth and evil to abhor / A mom with little people she had to nurture and feed / And with Heavenly help she met all their daily needs.” The poems appear only on the odd-numbered pages of this nearly 240-page volume. The even-numbered pages are either blank or feature stock images related to the topics of the poems. This ambitious collection will likely be of interest to the author’s loved ones and friends. But the work is a bit too uneven to be of interest to a larger poetry audience.
A wide-ranging yet monochrome collection of rhyming poems.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-72833-475-2
Page Count: 246
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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