A richly detailed and thoroughly entertaining historical tale.
A runaway farm girl sets out to find her brother in Lovett’s (Saving Miss Lillian, 2017, etc.) latest novel.
In the summer of 1924, 14-and-a-half-year-old Tenny Chance heads to Ashbyville, Georgia, after running away from the tenant shack on a Georgia plantation where she lived with her family. Her brother, Byron, had hopped a freight train after her mother’s death and never returned. Tenny also suspected that her father, an alcoholic, may have tried to sell her to their landlord for $25. Her dream is to find Byron and make sufficient money to return to the shack and save the rest of her family from hardship. On her way to Ashbyville, Tenny is secretly photographed bathing in a river by 17-year-old Gussie Pemberton and her young cousin Pete Godwin. Gussie’s family farm is struggling to make profit, and she’s dazzled by the thought of making it as a photographer in New York City. Meanwhile, Pete can’t stop thinking about Tenny. The fate of these characters becomes intriguingly intertwined as they search for success and happiness—but a conniving new mill manager, Ned Fletcher, could put their dreams in jeopardy. This novel has several appealing aspects, including the descriptive ease with which Lovett writes—an unfussy, unhurried style that quickly becomes endearing: “Somewhere the river rustled and birds chirped in the trees and August insects filled the air with humming.” As in her previous novels, Lovett proves herself to be a master of plot; the relationship between Tenny, who’s striving to pull herself out of the gutter, and Gussie, who’s reaching for the stars, could easily feel contrived, but it never does. Lovett unfurls the narrative with a tantalizing slowness that allows her to fully develop her characters, and readers will find themselves rooting for them. The denouement may feel a bit too polished for some readers, but others will find it deeply moving.
A richly detailed and thoroughly entertaining historical tale.Pub Date: June 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9996579-5-9
Page Count: 572
Publisher: Words of Passion
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
Homer’s deserved primacy makes us often forget that Virgil is in many ways his equal. Fagles’s triumphant new achievement...
The founding of Rome and the maturation of a hero who has greatness thrust upon him are the subjects of Virgil’s first-century (b.c.) epic, newly available in Princeton scholar Fagles’s energetic verse translation.
It succeeds Fagles’s critically acclaimed and very popular English-language renderings of Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey, the touchstones that preceded and inspired Virgil (the Latin poet’s hero Aeneas in fact makes a brief appearance in the Iliad). In 12 Books containing nearly 10,000 lines of unrhymed verse hexameters (i.e., six stresses per line), Virgil tells of the endangered voyages of Aeneas’s fleet of ships following the devastation of the Trojan War; his dalliance with Queen Dido of Carthage, and the abandonment of her that adds the scorned monarch’s lethal rage to that of (Aeneas’s nemesis) the offended goddess Juno; the hero’s journey to the underworld and reunion with the ghost of his father Anchises (one of classical literature’s imperishable scenes); and a litany of the deeds and sufferings of noble Romans that expands into a prophetic vision of a glorious future. Veteran scholar Bernard Knox’s replete introduction brilliantly summarizes the poem’s provenance, meanings and influence. And a “Translator’s Postscript” both emphasizes and illustrates “[Virgil’s] unequaled blend of grandeur and accessibility . . . of eloquence and action, heroics and humanity.” Fagles varies the hexameter pattern ingeniously, condensing to five stresses, or expanding to seven, depending on the desired rhetorical or emotional effect (e.g., “the dank night is sweeping down from the sky / and the setting stars incline our heads to sleep”)—and demonstrates his talents smashingly in scenes set in “The Kingdom of the Dead” (where, amid sulphurous sound and fury, we hear “. . . a crescendo of wailing, / ghosts of infants weeping, robbed of their share / of this sweet life, at its very threshold too”).
Homer’s deserved primacy makes us often forget that Virgil is in many ways his equal. Fagles’s triumphant new achievement makes us remember it.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03803-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
© Copyright 2025 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.
