A sweet, but not saccharine, comic novel.
Fed-up employees of a Boston pet-shelter network plot the comeuppance of their egomaniacal boss in this comic novel.
Diane Salvi, 25, the new communications director of the Animal Protection Organization, is a conscientious animal lover who wants to make a real contribution. But her boss, Hal Mason, keeps thwarting her best ideas in favor of his own vanity projects. Her co-workers—Hal’s assistant, Betty, and Southern belle fundraising director, Mary-Day—are smart women, dedicated to animal welfare. They sympathize with Diane, but Hal is the board of directors’ golden boy, despite his crudity and malapropisms. (At one point, Diane describes him as “Brad Pitt on the outside, Borat on the inside.”) When Hal finally overreaches, Diane and friends begin a covert investigation, aided by Diane’s friend and roommate Genie, a reporter for a local paper—but Diane’s relationship with Mark, Hal’s son, complicates things. A novel that features abandoned pets and animals could be heavy-handed, but Brown ((A)Musings, 2013, etc.) has a light touch, acknowledging sadness but avoiding gratuitous sentimentality. The characters’ well-developed back stories allow readers to make sense of their personalities and choices. Diane’s wry, comic voice is smart and enjoyable, and her romantic travails realistically lead her to greater self-knowledge. Hal’s well-drawn narcissism is funny and exasperating, and the excerpt from the book he’s “writing” is a dead-on portrayal of egotistical self-delusion. Brown’s exploration of Hal’s character also goes beneath the surface to look at the politics of Boston’s academic and Brahmin worlds. The author’s real-life experience with professional fundraising makes such concerns in the novel ring true. In the end, Diane and her friends cook up an extremely satisfying and well-timed showdown that will leave readers satisfied.
A sweet, but not saccharine, comic novel.Pub Date: June 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484107607
Page Count: 254
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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