An articulate and stirring Southern story written from the heart.
Four sisters keep vigil over their dying father and find themselves reminiscing over a bittersweet family history.
Goethe’s (River Bow, 2013, etc.) nostalgic and affecting novel is set in the Deep South and follows the lives of Matthew and Margaret Sobral and their four daughters: Rebecca, Elizabeth, Kate, and Emily. The book opens in the springtime of 1980 in south Louisiana. The girls’ mother has recently died, and their father has taken to his bed, stricken by a broken heart. As the daughters watch over their dying dad, they recall their childhood growing up in a progressive family in the racially prejudiced South. Intertwined is the story of their parents’ meeting and courtship, she a plucky newspaper reporter and he a genteel headmaster. The tale’s timeline is tacked skillfully and accurately to key historical events of the era. For example, Margaret and Matthew’s lives are affected by a GI—who owns the home they are renting— returning from war on the same day that Margaret gives birth to their first child. Similarly, the emergence of Elvis Presley and the John F. Kennedy assassination have significant impacts on the family, further enhancing the tale’s vivid realism. The sisters’ conversations paint a rich and colorful portrait of growing up in the South, as they recall playing “Devil in the Ditch” against a unique rural backdrop: “It was so scary, the scariest game I ever played,” Elizabeth asserts. And Emily replies, “Because the devil was alive to us….Whatever kid was in the ditch trying to catch us, drag us down, while we jumped back and forth across the ditch, whatever kid that was, truly became the devil.” This capturing of childhood innocence is juxtaposed with deliciously perceptive commentary from the narrator: “Later the sisters will blame their mother for almost everything wrong about them, or their lives. The mothers are the easiest to blame…too meek, too cloying or—in the case of Margaret Sobral—too remote. The mother tends to be the ‘sitting duck’ for the family shooting gallery.” The result is a moving, emotionally intuitive tale, littered with surprises, that brings a branch of the Sobral family tree vibrantly to life.
An articulate and stirring Southern story written from the heart.Pub Date: May 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9995668-0-0
Page Count: 276
Publisher: 1948
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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