Step aside, all you writers running on about the emptiness of small-town life. In this sprightly debut novel, Stevens portrays a suburban family with dignity, and it works as more than just a novelty. When her husband, Gordie, leaves her for another woman, Augusta Iris has a nervous breakdown in the supermarket parking lot, after which she takes to her bed and barely speaks to her younger son, Henry, who has just failed to graduate from high school and is mowing lawns for the summer for someone who deals marijuana on occasion. Frightened, Henry phones his older brother, Matthew, who comes home to Connecticut from Boston, where he is close to earning his Ph.D. in chemistry. Matthew is a loner who turns out to be inept at talking to his mother and mostly holes up in his boyhood room. Then Henry falls in love with Bette Mack, a spirited young woman who is bound to set his mother straight. After a disagreement with her own mother, she moves in with the Iris family and gets closer and closer to Augusta. This all sounds rather grim and clinical on paper, but Stevens has a light touch with domestic drama reminiscent of Laurie Colwin's. In sections that alternate between the third person and Augusta's voice, Bette encourages Augusta to smoke cigarettes and leaves newspapers in her room with horrible stories exposed (``car accidents, lost children, murders''), which Augusta eventually recognizes as ``the first company I'd had since Gordie left.'' Bette also works on drawing out Matthew (the two share an interest in vegetarianism) and goes a little too far with that project while Henry is obsessively working on a sculpture out in his father's old studio. Throughout, Stevens offers great insights in simple, direct language. This is not flawless work—Bette's own personality is never quite clear enough, and the ending is strikingly neat—but it is an impressive and delightful debut.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-85839-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
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