Not one of this crowd-pleasing author’s best, but a solid, workmanlike B-plus effort.
The cottage on the New Hampshire coast that housed the protagonists of The Pilot’s Wife (1998) and Sea Glass (2002) makes a poignant setting for Shreve’s tale of a young widow thrown into a fraught family drama.
At 29, Sydney Sklar has already been married twice. She’s well aware of the irony that she divorced a pilot because of his dangerous profession, only to have her second husband, a brand-new doctor, drop dead of a brain aneurysm after eight months of marriage. Bad twists of fate lurk in Shreve’s dark narrative, full of glancing references to car accidents and old tragedies the cottage has seen. Sydney is there for the summer to tutor Julie, the sweet but “slow” late-life child of Mr. and Mrs. Edwards (rarely referred to by their first names). Sydney is fond of the girl and her father; she and Mrs. Edwards share a mutual dislike. The tension ratchets up with the arrival of Julie’s much older brothers: 35-year-old Ben, a corporate-real-estate agent, and 31-year-old MIT professor Jeff. Sydney doesn’t care for Ben, whom she thinks groped her when the brothers took her body surfing at night, and she’s disturbingly attracted to Jeff, who has a gorgeous girlfriend. The two make an emotional connection looking for Julie one night when she’s late coming home; they make love for the first time (Jeff’s dumped the girlfriend) on the evening Julie runs off to Montreal to live with a lesbian lover no one knew she had. Ben reacts to Sydney and Jeff’s engagement with outrage that seems excessive until the novel’s shocking dénouement, which leaves Sydney to remake her life for the third time. Seen exclusively through her eyes, the other characters are vivid but ultimately opaque, so the novel seems somewhat solipsistic. As a portrait of a woman belatedly coming of age after being buffeted by fate, however, it’s well drawn and will satisfy Shreve’s fans.
Not one of this crowd-pleasing author’s best, but a solid, workmanlike B-plus effort.Pub Date: April 24, 2007
ISBN: 0-316-05985-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
