More subtly agenda-driven than most of its kind.
First novel from a prominent British politician wrestles intelligently with the question of euthanasia, as the once close marriage of a couple with a brain-damaged son nearly breaks down.
Narrator Mark Wellings, initially a blindly self-absorbed husband and father, over the course of his story learns as much about life and faith as love. His wife Claire, the daughter of wealthy self-made businessman Sam Renwick, is also not terribly perceptive, but the pair’s obtuseness is as much a product of the strain of caring for son Jeremy as an innate personality trait. The story begins on the afternoon of daughter Pippa’s christening, when four-year-old Jeremy runs into the street and is hit by a speeding drunk driver. The boy survives but is severely disabled and requires constant tending to: he cannot speak, move, or feed himself. As the years pass, Claire retreats from friends and potentially helpful support groups, insisting on assuming full responsibility for Jeremy. Mark, bored with his accounting job and worn down by the tensions at home, suggests that he and Claire take a vacation. She insists he go alone. While on holiday Mark is tempted—though he doesn’t succumb—by an attractive, perceptive young widow he meets. As the Wellings drift further apart, Claire’s sister Sally, an MP, introduces a bill legalizing euthanasia under certain conditions. The press learns about Jeremy, and Mark and Claire must contend with all the unwanted media attention, as well as with a terrible accident in which some of Pippa’s school friends are killed. When Jeremy dies in a seeming accident, Mark decides he is now free to leave and make a new life for himself. But the author still has a few surprises up her sleeve, as she drives her sometimes overly action-packed plot to an affirmative end.
More subtly agenda-driven than most of its kind.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-297-64572-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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