The disillusioning ``education'' of a high-school English teacher takes center stage in this only moderately interesting melodrama from Nelson, the New Mexicobased author of three story collections and a previous novel (Talking in Bed, 1995). Thirtyish Birdy Stone, who has shrugged off both an unsatisfying engagement and a dead-end love affair, can't understand how she ended up in the depressed southwestern dust bowl of Pinetop, trying to interest her bored students in the books through which she herself lives a far more pleasing life. Inhaling marijuana with her gay colleague JÇsus helps some, but things really perk up when Birdy is hired by Isadora Anthony, who's writing a book (semi-literate) about the unexplained deaths of her daughter and husband in separate accidents a decade earlier—and especially when Birdy tumbles into bed with Isadora's teenage son (and her student) Mark. This may be Main Street revisited, and there's more than a little of Sinclair Lewis's Carol Kennicott in her, but Birdy knows she's no Cleopatra, and that the puppylike Mark Anthony, though he's cute and sexually inexhaustible, isn't the commanding hero who'll rescue her from her doldrums: ``Living in a trailer on the shady side of town, smoking pot with her best friend the homosexual, dating a seventeen-year-old ninny, investigating a teenage suicide.'' For Birdy is convinced she has ferreted out the truths about the Anthony family's losses. What she learns, however, is that unsolvable mysteries give depths to the lives of people whom she has formerly ignored or misunderstood. Nothing much happens here, and Birdy's hard-won illumination doesn't make her more appealing (her sense of humor comes and goes while her self-pity won't quit) in a story whose best moments are provided by supporting characters—like the cheerfully pregnant Luziana Rillos, a student whose earth-motherly presence kicks the novel awake every now and then. Nelson's longer fiction, at least as shown by this misfire, lacks the energy and concentration that distinguish her short stories.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83932-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
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
© Copyright 2026 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.
