Sort of a Polish-American Peyton Place: a touching portrait of childhood innocence on a collision course with worldly...
First novel about a young girl in a Pennsylvania mill town who grows up prematurely by discovering a family secret laid to rest years before.
Drue Heinz winner Block (stories: Destination Known, 2001) takes us to Hyde Bend in the 1940s, a place where all the fathers worked in the steel mill, all the mothers kept house, and everybody knew everybody else’s business. The narrator (unnamed), in her early teens, is a bright but sheltered child whose life is centered on the parish church, where she and her younger brother Martin go to school and her mother cooks for the priest. Her father works the nightshift at the mill and isn’t home much, and the narrator stands in for him somewhat by looking after her brother and keeping him out of trouble. No one in town has a lot money except for Swatka Pani, the miserly old lady who owns most of Hyde Bend’s apartments and has a heart blacker than Allegheny anthracite. When the narrator notices that her mother has begun pawning small items from the house—even her beloved, expensive icon of the Black Madonna—she assumes that her father has been spending the rent money on drink, and she persuades a local butcher to hire her as delivery girl to make ends meet. Anyone who makes deliveries all day will learn a lot about people, of course, and the narrator makes the acquaintance of the creepiest woman in town: a lady whose son grew up to become a priest but committed suicide not long after taking over the local parish. When Swatka Pani is murdered, the mysterious lady tells the narrator who did it—and a few other things beside. Is she a crazy recluse—or the only sane woman in town?
Sort of a Polish-American Peyton Place: a touching portrait of childhood innocence on a collision course with worldly experience—though it ultimately goes far, far over the edge.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-052504-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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