Fast, fun, undemanding.
Father Greeley slaps in the fourth brick in his Chicago O’Malleys saga, begun with A Midwinter’s Tale (1998).
Rosemarie’s psychopathic father is dead, Rosemarie has inherited wealth, is now a recovering alcoholic and, with five kids, thinks herself as oversexed as husband Chucky does. A decorated Korean vet and famous photographer of the Little Rock racial imbroglio and of Germany, Chucky was named Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany by Jack Kennedy, although he now argues with new President LBJ about his Vietnam policy and foresees his own sons fighting in Vietnam in ten years. Chuck resigns and takes the family back to Chicago. But this time, brilliantly, Greeley has assigned the storytelling to Rosemarie, who becomes quite an amusing if underweight sexpot as well as a firebrand when Selma erupts and she hauls Chuck and his camera down to the Alabama barricades. Bossy Rosemarie, against Chuck’s wishes, marches 50 miles, singing “We shall overcome” with Dr. Martin Luther King and a pair of nuns. This leads to the liberal O’Malleys becoming radicals, with Beatles-loving daughter April Rosemary, a student at Trinity High School, embarrassed to tears because her parents are always on television defending the Alabama Negroes (“If they can’t help themselves, isn’t it their fault!”), though later, at Harvard, she becomes most vocal and drops out of the family, calling herself “irrelevant.” Chuck soon bunks down in a hooch at Khe Sanh where the Marines burn bodies (some wearing Catholic medals) left behind by the Viet Cong. Rosemarie grows even more underweight with Chuck in Nam, and though he returns safely she still has horrifying rape dreams from her late father’s abuse. They are in the kitchen with Bobby Kennedy when Sirhan Sirhan shoots him; and when they attend the Democratic Convention in Chicago, both are beaten by the police, Rosemary badly. By story’s end, Rosemarie turns to writing short stories, her eye on The New Yorker.
Fast, fun, undemanding.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-87225-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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