Earnest and predictable: a good start but nothing special.
Debut about a gay teenager coming of age in a small New England town.
For Noah York, at 17, adolescence hasn’t exactly turned out to be one long kegger: After his father’s death the year before, Noah’s eccentric mother Virginia has become increasingly unstable and difficult to live with. A well-regarded poet, she accepts a post at Cassidy College and moves with Noah from Chicago to Oakland, New Hampshire, where she buys a ramshackle Victorian house and tries to start a new life. Going from the big city to the sticks is hard for Noah, who’s gay, but he settles into a new routine pretty quickly, helping Virginia renovate the house and making friends with the local kids—among them J.D. Curtis, a classmate who lives nearby and becomes Noah’s best friend. Athletic and clean-cut, J.D. is a bit too All-American for the smartmouthed Noah, but they quickly become inseparable—and eventually fall in love. This development causes more trouble at first for J.D. (who had girlfriends and never thought of himself as gay) than for Noah, but it soon gets both of them in hot water when J.D.’s sister discovers them having sex and word spreads through the town. There are the usual fistfights and insults, and, after J.D.’s mother throws him out of the house, he comes to live with Noah and Virginia, who is more understanding but also in the middle of a crisis of her own. In redoing the house, Virginia began to discover Mason jars hidden in the walls with poems and notes from the Carlisles, an unhappy couple who lived there years ago. Becoming increasingly obsessed with this past, she has a mental breakdown after finding the skeleton of a baby girl buried in the basement. As Virginia slowly recovers her sanity, Noah and J.D. begin to build new lives for themselves together.
Earnest and predictable: a good start but nothing special.Pub Date: March 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-7582-0348-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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.
