A well-written, fast-paced, and satisfying historical adventure.
In this series opener and pastiche sequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), Jim Hawkins’ plans to become a doctor are scuttled when he’s forced into another seaborne adventure.
It’s four years after the events described in Treasure Island, said here to have been written as a memoir by James “Jim” Hawkins. Jim, now 17, has enough takings from his treasure and his book to make him a rich man. Most of the money is held in trust until Jim is 21, but it’s time to consider a profession. He decides that, like family friend Dr. David Livesey, he too will become a physician and help “make the world a better place.” Dr. Livesey arranges for an apprenticeship to his friend, Dr. John Taylor, a surgeon at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. While waiting for a boat to London, Jim can stay with Dr. Livesey’s sister in Plymouth. All well and good—but while in Plymouth, Jim is press-ganged aboard the ominously named HMS Barabbas and put to work as captain’s steward, becoming apprenticed to Dr. Wilequet, knowledgeable but usually drunk. Jim soon learns that not all pirates sail under the skull and bones, and that his own memoir—which mentions still-buried treasure—has put him in danger. He’ll need courage, wits, and luck to get back to dry land. Jeapes (The Xenocide Mission, 2018, etc.) offers a nicely judged take on a classic historical adventure novel. With an occasional slip into modern diction, Jeapes generally reproduces the speech rhythms and vocabulary of Stevenson’s novel successfully, and he provides vividly authentic descriptions of life (and death) aboard ship: “Jim just had a moment to see the water around the target erupt with white splashes, before the cloud of smoke that had burst from the guns blew back across the ship. A chemical stink tore at the back of his throat and stung his eyes.” Moments of humor, a little romance, and just desserts help enliven the sometimes-dark proceedings.
A well-written, fast-paced, and satisfying historical adventure.Pub Date: June 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-07-305745-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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