A small gem—more understated than Nelson’s recent stories, but equally sharp and deeply moving.
From novelist and short-story writer Nelson (Nothing Right, 2009, etc.), a brief, sorrowfully comic novel about family dysfunction that considers everyone’s contribution—parents, children, spouses, even pets.
Driving alone with her dog, Misty Mueller is in a one-car accident. The dog escapes the overturned car and is adopted by a young woman camping nearby, but Misty, a single mother, dies. When her 15-year-old daughter Cattie gets the news, she runs away from her Vermont prep school. After hiding briefly in Montpelier, she sets off on a cross-country road trip with a troubled but sweet-natured Army deserter and his dogs. In Wichita, Kan., Misty’s childhood friend Catherine has completely lost touch with Misty. In her late 30s now and married to Oliver, a successful, much older entrepreneur with two grown daughters from previous marriages, Catherine is oblivious when Oliver follows the pattern he previously established to exit his first two marriages by beginning an affair with an even younger woman. Without children of her own or a real career, Catherine expends her energy caring for her mother Grace, a former professor who has suffered a stroke. Grace’s mental acuity remains intact despite her inability to speak, and she remains hurtfully critical of her daughter’s passivity and lack of ambition. Then Catherine learns that she has been named Cattie’s guardian and searches her out. Once Catherine finds Cattie, their relationship evolves by sharing memories of Misty. To Cattie, Misty was a tough-minded single mom who provided well for her daughter. Catherine remembers their wild adolescence together: Catherine the rebellious bourgeois, Misty the white-trash girl with no future; while they took risks with drugs and sex, a serial killer remained on the loose nearby. Now, as Catherine eases into the role of her namesake’s guardian, the same killer has resurfaced, and the news surrounding his banal evil creates the backdrop/counterpoint to the characters’ growing understanding of their places in the world.
A small gem—more understated than Nelson’s recent stories, but equally sharp and deeply moving.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59691-575-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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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