Saskia, a bright, sardonic, fiercely imaginative adolescent, offers a salty record of her coming-of-age in this sharply observant novel. Hall, a novelist (The Dreamers, 1988) and an accomplished travel writer (The Impossible Country: A Journey Through the Last Days of Yugoslavia, 1994, etc.), is clearly fascinated by outsized, complex characters. Saskia, at 12, is the most responsible figure in a ramshackle farm on the outskirts of Ithaca. The farm was once a commune (Wonderland), and Lauren, Saskia's mother, who stayed on after its collapse, ekes out a sufficient living from farming to support some hapless eccentrics attracted by her unquestioning generosity. Saskia herself, who loves books, finds time, while overseeing much of the day-to-day life on the farm, for an exuberant fantasy life, weaving together a world based on her affection for such heroes as Odysseus, Marco Polo, and Horatio Hornblower. She's drawn out of herself by a growing friendship with the elegant, worldly Jane Singh (13), and by the arrival of her long-absent father, the charismatic Thomas. (He's been away for so long, he says, because he's been an eco-warrior, going so far as to sabotage a whaling vessel.) Thomas, however, turns out to be manipulative, selfish, and rather alarmingly pleased with Jane's growing crush on him. He's also an extraordinary liar. Faced with a variety of disasters, Saskia grows up, doing what she can to save her friend and coming to grips with her own past—all within a portrait of commune life that's painfully convincing. Hall's cast of characters is very precisely drawn, but most remarkable is his portrait of Saskia. Part child, part alert young woman, she is entirely believable, and her narrative, slyly observant, filled with references to her beloved books, unblinking in its depiction of adult foibles, is compelling. Finally, Saskia's hard-won accommodation with life at the climax is moving, offering a realistic and satisfying conclusion to a highly original novel. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1997
ISBN: 0-395-82754-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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