A sentimental, contemporary women’s novel with a retro vibe that’s engaging despite its flaws.
Newspaper journalist and novelist Ferrendelli (An Invincible Summer, 2015, etc.) tells the story of a troubled big-city reporter who starts over in a small town.
Bridgette Connor of the Reporter-Herald in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is emotionally spent when she flees the state, haunted by the suicide of one of her exposé subjects and heartbroken over her own decision to terminate her pregnancy. She has no intention of stopping in Windsor, Kentucky, until an automobile accident strands her there. She stumbles, injured, into the Sunrise Diner, where Alexis Parker, the proprietor, helps her to find medical help and gives her a place to stay. The two immediately hit it off, and Bridgette starts a new life in Windsor with Alexis; her daughter, Eden, who has various special needs; and her African-American housekeeper, nanny, and friend, Eda Mae Fletcher. After two false starts at resuming her journalism career, Bridgette realizes that she’s meant to work at the diner, and after providing Alexis with emergency financial assistance, she becomes her business partner. The two women confront myriad challenges together but are still unprepared for a devastating crisis. Later, Alexis must act when it seems that Eden’s biological father, Cal, is determined to do what’s worst for his daughter. This novel is largely an emotionally satisfying read, reminiscent at times of Fannie Flagg’s 1987 novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. However, the author often has Bridgette and Alexis proclaim their deep, abiding friendship for each other in dialogue rather than simply showing it in action. One secondary character, postal employee Blanche Ashby, provides comic relief and is more fully developed than some of the other players; Eda Mae, in particular, feels like a throwback, stock character of early- to mid-20th-century literature. Pragmatic readers may also wonder how Bridgette could indefinitely stay on in Windsor after initially intending to seek refuge there for just one night.
A sentimental, contemporary women’s novel with a retro vibe that’s engaging despite its flaws.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5406-8247-5
Page Count: 324
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2017
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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