A sweet narrative about self-actualization.
When an aspiring author begins horseback-riding lessons, she discovers her true passion in Andrews’ (Saints in the City, 2008, etc.) novel.
Clarissa “Claire” Stamos is saddled with a stale marriage and an unfulfilling job at her father’s hardware store, but writing is her main joy. When inspiration for a Western romance screenplay strikes, she takes riding lessons at a nearby barn for research. Although her newfound fascination with horses alienates her husband, George, she keeps at it, investing in a sweet-tempered, 18-year-old appendix quarter horse named Sonny, who serves as the novel’s narrator. Claire experiences the ups and downs of riding, from her first fall to the complicated social dynamics at Crown Ridge, where Sonny is boarded. Meanwhile, the divide between the married couple grows; Claire suspects that George is using his weekly wine club to commit infidelity: “When George…gives her a kiss, there’s wine on his breath. She doesn’t know the vintage or the provenance, but she knows betrayal when she tastes it.” She finds her own temptation in Sebastian Bergalo, a top-notch, handsome Argentinian trainer at Crown Ridge. She initially thinks that he’s an arrogant snob, but his admiration for her can-do spirit brings them closer. As Claire falls deeper in love with the world of horses, her confidence blooms. But when George is offered a job in Paris, he gives her an ultimatum: either she stops riding or he leaves. Andrews hits the mark in using the traumas of the primary characters to create stories of healing. Claire, for example, has long suppressed a history of sexual abuse; Sonny is haunted by memories of a violent former owner; and Sebastian has his own secrets beneath his confident exterior. The heavy use of equestrian terminology may grow tiresome to readers unfamiliar with the mechanics of riding (“Apply your inside leg at the girth and hold him in with your outside leg”), but it’s outweighed by the grounded, almost spiritual tone of Sonny’s narration: “She falls asleep where she is as the moon rises and remnants of raindrops glint on the glass panels above, just like the grass where I graze glistens under moonlight.”
A sweet narrative about self-actualization.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-93662-7
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Flying Chestnut Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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