Repetitious, slow-moving, endlessly sentimental.
An elderly widow loses a son but gains a daughter as she returns to her roots and allows an old wound to heal.
Naomi, the widow, narrates. She is a child of the South, from a poor family in a coastal town near Charleston, South Carolina. In 1946, she marries her childhood sweetheart Eli; their old-world courtship has a simple dignity that eludes Lott (The Hunt Club, 1998, etc.) elsewhere. Both are devout Baptists, and the Christian ethic permeates Naomi’s life. The next year, the two move to Massachusetts, where Eli starts a plumbing business with his best friend, Lonny. Then the young marrieds get some really bad news: They won’t be able to have children. Uncharacteristically, Eli fails to comfort his wife, whereupon Naomi turns to Lonny and initiates joyless sex with him, a single lapse that will torment her throughout their 50-year marriage. Lonny confesses to Eli that same day, yet husband and wife, always deeply loving, never talk it through, a story aspect that’s barely credible. Eventually, the couple do make a baby. Their son Mahlon grows up to wed Ruth, both of them also devout Christians. Then, after 22 years of a childless marriage, Mahlon dies in a car accident. Naomi and Ruth, now both widows, form a bond so close that when Naomi decides to return to the South, abandoning the wonderful friends in her quilting bee, Ruth goes with her. “Where you go, I will go,” she declares biblically. Back home, Naomi rejoices in that special light filtered through the pines, but even more in the true light of loving kin—her stepbrother and wife and their children and grandchildren. All illustrate God’s “tender mercies,” his cornucopia of gifts and blessings that offset life’s tragedies. Naomi’s pain from her long-ago adultery dissolves in the familial warmth, yet the goodhearted rituals are not only painfully cloying but can’t mask the lack of a storyline.
Repetitious, slow-moving, endlessly sentimental.Pub Date: April 20, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-50377-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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