Whether the bird lore is essential to the story is debatable; what is not is the elegance of the meditation on mortality.
In Kessler’s second novel (following Lick Creek, 2001, not reviewed), the relatives of the victims of an airplane crash are thrown together briefly in a remote inn.
A Dutch jet plane, en route from New York to Amsterdam, crashes into the ocean off Trachis Island, near Nova Scotia. The local innkeeper, Kevin Gearns, a middle-aged gay American who owns the inn with his partner Douglas, is asked to accommodate the passengers’ relatives. They are a mixed bunch: a Chinese couple, a Bulgarian pianist, an Iranian exile, etc. And then there is the American ornithologist, Ana Gathreaux; she and Kevin are the protagonists. We seem to be in for a formulaic story of strangers becoming entangled, but that is not Kessler’s purpose. He is as much concerned with the spirit as the flesh. One of the passengers, Ana’s husband Russell (another ornithologist), had wondered, seconds before the crash, about his coming metamorphosis. He had once told Ana he believed in ghosts. The Liangs from Taipei are absolute believers; they wait up all night for their daughter Tien to appear. Diana Olmstead, a convert to Buddhism who has lost a sister, has a different agenda. She feels compelled to offer comfort to all “the souls of the dead through their transmigration,” for there will be no survivors. The climax for the relatives comes on a night during a raging storm, when the power is out. They are drawn to the candlelit piano where the Bulgarian is playing a Chopin nocturne for his drowned cellist wife, and creating a momentary union between the living and the dead, gathered outside. This might have been a haunting novella, but Kessler has enlarged his story with extensive commentary on birds, especially their migratory patterns, Ana’s specialty. We are left reflecting how much we already know about their extraordinary journeys, and how little about our own.
Whether the bird lore is essential to the story is debatable; what is not is the elegance of the meditation on mortality.Pub Date: April 18, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-8738-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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