Initially gripping, Erskine's follow-up to her successful Lady of Hay (1987) ultimately reads like a bad TV movie. British biographer Kate Kennedy rents a cottage in North Essex to write her new book and recover from a soured relationship with immature Jon Bevan. The landlord's son Greg, a talented painter frustrated by his lack of opportunity, is enraged when his parents rent ``his'' cottage to Kate. When doors start slamming, her computer goes haywire, and maggot-infested dirt piles appear in the cottage, Kate blames Greg. Meanwhile the tide and some digging by Greg's sister uncover a Roman/Druid grave that has lain untouched for centuries, releasing the ghosts of an ill-fated love triangle. This horror/thriller manages to work in a little bit of fascinating history about Boudicca, a Celtic warrior queen who rose against the Romans, and it offers some insight into Celtic/Roman relations. Erskine wisely shies away from the clichÇ of reincarnation, opting instead for demonic possession, but the three spirits illogically possess different people and wreak different levels of havoc. The author could have pumped new blood into this tired genre by further elaborating her theme of colonization, whether Londoners' gentrification of East Anglia or British authors' economic need to pander to an American market. Instead she just throws more players into the soup, including Kate's sister, the now remorseful Jon, an unhappy neighboring family, an unflappable taxi driver, and Kate's publisher. The array of threats from the ghosts would be truly frightening if any of the characters, live or dead, were properly developed. But they seem no brighter than mice in a maze; after almost 100 pages of mindless violence, the anticlimactic ending comes as absolutely no surprise. A near miss. Erskine clearly has some talent; with a little more thought—and more historical research—she could do something wonderful.
Pub Date: July 11, 1994
ISBN: 0-525-93862-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
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.
