Exceptionally satisfying; Lovett is the real deal.
Well-begun is half done, and debut novelist Lovett captures us on the very first page of this story set in rural Georgia in the middle of the last century.
What snares us so quickly is the narrator, Mae Lee Willis, daughter of Gwen and Chap and long-suffering kid sister of the insufferable Ava. Headstrong Ava is beautiful and sexy and damn well knows it. She sets her cap for Duke Radford, scion of the well-to-do Radfords. And she wins him just before he goes off to fight in WWII. But true to form, she lets handsome Hardy Pritchett, a married man, romance her while Duke is gone. Hardy falls down the stairs of his house and breaks his neck! Duke comes back (yes, it’s he who sent her the ruby earrings from Burma), and they marry, but the glamorous life that Ava expected does not come to pass. Rather than join his father’s successful manufacturing business, Duke—severely battle fatigued—opts to take over Grandfather Radford’s farm. Duke craves the quiet life; Ava is not pleased. Duke, a good man, deeply loves Ava, but that is not enough for her. Gawky Mae Lee is aware of everything and loves Duke from afar. The plot ignites with the appearance of Jack Austin, Duke’s Army buddy, a thoroughgoing bastard who relishes chaos and seduction. Any conscientious reviewer needs to stop here, but it’s no spoiler to note that Jack wreaks considerable havoc. This book is wonderfully written. Every bit of dialogue rings true. The reader will properly hate Ava but finally—thanks to Mae Lee—come to a more nuanced view of her than might seem possible. The conclusion—less talented novelists take note—might seem too easy, like too much wish fulfillment. But it is not simply because Lovett prepares it, works hard at it, and writes so well.
Exceptionally satisfying; Lovett is the real deal.Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9960709-6-6
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Words of Passion
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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