Bracing and raw portrait of the inner life of a directionless, if passionate, suburban rebel.
The dark heart of a 1960s Levittown family is artfully revealed.
Shapiro (Life and Love, Such as It Is, 1999, etc.) chronicles the high-school years of Maude Pugh, the misunderstood daughter of a self-important artist and a socially awkward mother. The Pughs live in a house that seems to be the clone of a thousand others, but on the inside is utterly unique; her father has painted all the walls black to better display his artwork. Maude’s best friend Weesie thinks the house is a marvel, but Maude yearns for the understated elegance of Weesie’s upper-class Long Island manor. If the interior of Maude’s house is unusual, the interior of her family is even more so. Her mother and father split up over the course of the narrative, and her older brother Seth, unabashedly idolized by her parents, has disappeared from their lives, leaving Maude to bear the brunt of her parents’ brutalizing emotional eccentricities. Maude, chafing at her family’s restraints, secretly applies and wins a scholarship to attend Bay Farm, an elite private high school. Once there, Maude is introduced to both class ambition and class division: Her parents are uncomfortable because she is moving up the social ladder; her classmates fetishize her because she is an artist’s daughter with all of the requisite quirks; and Maude herself is caught between the knowledge that she doesn’t really belong among the very wealthy and a new sense of class difference. When Maude loses her scholarship and enrolls in community college, she finds herself even more of an outsider. Although the plot appears to follow the usual coming-of-age story are by concentrating on a typically angst-ridden adolescent girl, it has none of the loss-of-innocence rhetoric or false family resolutions that characterize the genre. Shapiro’s portrait of Maude is knife-sharp; she completely inhabits the consuming inner world of a painfully intelligent adolescent girl, showing Maude’s every mood, thought and desire with piercing clarity.
Bracing and raw portrait of the inner life of a directionless, if passionate, suburban rebel.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-56947-431-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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