Fleming’s ability to fully inhabit the consciousness of her characters is flawless, as are her portraits of the ordinary and...
Self-assured exploration of day-to-day family trauma, and then some.
In most ways, the Riggs family is completely ordinary, even boring. The family is composed of two devoted parents, the requisite smart-aleck son and two daughters who squabble their way from childhood to adolescence. The one anomaly is that the oldest daughter is an albino, a condition that affects everyone in the family. The novel is focused mainly on daughters Glynnis and Carol, and it traces the standard fare: childhood traumas; the Byzantine social codes of adolescent girls; unpredictable sexual desires; the comforting and smothering nature of family life. Fleming’s adherence to the rules of the coming-of-age family drama makes her clever riffs on the genre all the more potent. For example, in one of the most important childhood events, Carol, frustrated at the social exclusion she experiences because she is an albino, pushes a piano on her younger sister Glynnis, permanently disabling her. Fleming’s unabashed reliance on such extravagantly over-the-top events threatens to undermine the story, turning it into mere parody, but her gift at characterization anchors the novel and proves utterly compelling while being heavily plotted—the girls are constantly negotiating the landmines of adolescence—but character-driven all the same. Particularly noteworthy are the minor characters: Beryl Balls, the former war nurse who devotes herself to making girls self-reliant in the Girl Guides, and who cherishes an unconsummated and unrecognized romance with another nurse killed in the war; Tracy Novak, the cool lesbian with whom Glynnis falls in love at school; Grunt, Carol’s misfit, stuttering, wannabe punk boyfriend. Fleming treads a fine line between describing scenes of social trauma so pitch perfect readers will squirm in their chairs and moments of transcendence during which characters see the possibility of happiness and human connection.
Fleming’s ability to fully inhabit the consciousness of her characters is flawless, as are her portraits of the ordinary and extraordinary life of adolescent girls.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-55192-831-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Raincoast
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
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.
