Youthful passions still burn strong as Esstman (The Other Anna, not reviewed), in a second novel that tries hard to tug the heartstrings but only occasionally succeeds, profiles a woman who finds the courage to reclaim her life after losing her son. Set on a farm on the banks of the Missouri River shortly after WW II, the story limns in self-consciously lyrical prose a woman's belated discovery, in the aftermath of a tragedy, of unsuspected strengths and middle-aged passion, making this a sort of Bridges of Madison County with a happy ending. When 16-year-old Simon is thrown by his mother's favorite horse, Zad, and dies, the Mahler family, never very cohesive anyway, falls apart. Events before and after the tragedy are recalled and analyzed by family members, as well as by Ozzie Kline, the wrangler who has loved horses—and Nora—since he and she were both teenagers. Nora, who was especially close to her son Simon, breaks down completely; husband Neal has her hospitalized and subjected to electric shock treatment. He also shoots Zad, sends the remaining horses away, and tries to sell the farm, though it's been in Nora's family for 70 years. Ozzie, who'd been working on the farm, disappears after the accident but soon returns to help Nora, who refuses to give up the farm. While Nora slowly recovers, Neal, using daughter Clea as a pawn, continues his verbal abuse of Nora: Refusing to give her a divorce, he threatens to hospitalize her again. But Nora, with her mother's and Ozzie's help, finds the strength to stand up to him and choose the kind of life she loves—working with horses—and finally admit her enduring love for Ozzie. One of those reassuring it's never-too-late-to-live-and-love- stories that will resonate with aging boomers and 40-plus romantics. (First printing of 75,000; $75,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-15-100288-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
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
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