A successful, bipolar artist decides to live it up for 30 days before ending her own life.
Off her meds and manic (but certain she will never get better), Clementine Pritchard feels a sense of calm and purpose once she finally commits to killing herself. A well-known multimedia artist, Clementine suffers from debilitating, explosive mood swings not unlike the ones she witnessed her own mother going through during her childhood. Those ended badly when her mother shot herself and her younger sister Ramona, leaving Clementine to live with an aunt. Hoping to never leave her own loved ones to such a fate, she scores some animal tranquilizer in Tijuana and tells people she has inoperable brain cancer. Her inner circle, including her devoted assistant Jenny and still-smitten ex-husband Richard, try their best to help her, but her mind is made up. With the clock ticking, she makes good use of her time. She sleeps with both Richard (great) and her former shrink Miles (bad), poses nude for a rival artist and eats her way through the best ethnic takeout food L.A. has to offer. She works, too, hitting her creative stride and producing daring and dark new pieces. She also tries to get her affairs in order and find a home for her cat Chuckles, a male Persian almost as ornery as Clementine herself. Complications ensue, though, when she tracks down her long-lost father in Kansas City. Her hopes for healing and closure are turned on their head when a family drama gives her a chance, for a change, to be a caregiver rather than the one needing care. But is it enough to change her course? With her razor wit and over-it-all candor, Clementine makes for a fascinating companion, and Ream manages to craft an engaging and impressive debut without soft-pedaling how very sick Clementine is. You’ll sure miss her when she’s gone.
Pub Date: March 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-209363-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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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