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HOME FOR THE DAY

Name: HOME FOR THE DAY
Author: Anderson Ferrell
ISBN: 0-394-58094-X

by Anderson Ferrell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 6, 1994

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A slight, drifting novel full of emotion but lacking in action. A man on a mysterious mission to his family's graveyard from New York City, whose father is breathing down his neck with a shotgun, stops to tell the story of both his southern upbringing and a passionate affair with a man who has died. Ferrell (Where She Was, 1985) creates some startling images, like that of the narrator's mother striking him in the face with a hairbrush when he wishes aloud that she had married a man other than his unfaithful father. But Ferrell has a habit of using fey language and convoluted syntax. Phrases like ``By me he is loved'' and ``Why she did it is in the story of it'' just gum up the flow. A boyhood relationship with a tough guy named Johnny is convincing with its homoerotic tension, but it goes off track when the narrator and Johnny attend a fair together and Johnny jilts him. The narrator ends up in the red velvet and pink satin decorated trailer (``my ideal of real elegance'') of the man who does the elephant act and has a sexual experience described in gauzy terms (``It was red and sparkly when it happened''). There is a breathless tone here, indicating that the novel is speeding toward a strong finish—which it delivers—but often the language is so vague and affected that the true drama is hidden along the way. Also, while Ferrell does a decent job with the material, much of it (the violent southern father, the gay man as a young boy fixing his mother's hair, the fast-moving high life of the performance world) feels archetypal rather than specific. Brevity, overwrought language, and episodes with little bearing on the plot combine to give this the feeling of an excellent short story padded into a so-so novel.

Pub Date: Sept. 6, 1994

ISBN: 0-394-58094-X

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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DISTANT SHORES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...

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Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.

After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).

Pub Date: July 1, 2002

ISBN: 0-345-45071-X

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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.