Though one wishes to give the recently widowed author a free ride, Blood Canticle is as gaily slipshod, gushy, and...
Rice in short form after the lengthy Blackwood Farm (2002), this time featuring characters shuffled together from the Vampire Lestat series and the Mayfair Witches series.
Rice allows Lestat to narrate for the first time since 1995’s Memnoch the Devil—which, according to Lestat, was the largest-selling entry in the entire series (probably because Tom Cruise’s Interview with the Vampire had come out the year before, reinvigorating the series and filling new readers in on the first novel). It’s not fair to expect Rice to write as impressively as she did 28 years ago (although there are long, beautiful, well-researched passages in her historicals), but the fact remains that Louis, the brooding, reluctant vampire of Interview, is Rice’s best narrator, far superior to Lestat, who runs off at the mouth and whose prose has none of the sweet grip of Louis’s. Canticle picks up where Blackwood left off, with beautiful nymphet Mona near death in young Quinn Blackwood’s arms. Lestat is on hand, still reeling from seeing Satan and God in person in Memnoch, and now set on being a saint. Despite his unflagging vanity, Lestat has also absorbed the main quality of Louis: revulsion toward the Curse. Though having met God and now seeking redemption, Lestat goes on sucking blood—but only of bad guys! He's helping God sweep mankind free of misbegotten hellspawn. For Quinn, Lestat gives Mona the Dark Trick, and then the three of them go to New Orleans to induct Mona into her first thirst-quenching. Meanwhile, Lestat has fallen headlong for Rowan Mayfair, the witch and neurosurgeon who finds Lestat attractive—attractions forced on both of them by Rice. And where is Morrigan, Mona’s monstrous full-grown Woman-Child, fathered by Rowan’s manly husband Michael?
Though one wishes to give the recently widowed author a free ride, Blood Canticle is as gaily slipshod, gushy, and first-draftish as Merrick.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41200-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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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