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WALKING THROUGH MIRRORS

Name: WALKING THROUGH MIRRORS
Author: Brian Keith Jackson
ISBN: 0-671-56893-0

by Brian Keith Jackson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1998

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Jackson (The View From Here, 1997) returns with a genuinely moving if rather bloated tale of a young African-American man returning home to bury his father. Twenty-eight-year-old Jeremy “Patience” Bishop leaves Manhattan, where he is a successful and increasingly well-known photographer, for the funeral of his father, Christopher Bishop, and author Jackson provides an abundance of memories and events before unraveling the ambiguous history behind the relation between Jeremy and his father. The story opens as Jeremy arrives in his hometown of Elsewhere, Louisiana. His mother, though she died shortly after Jeremy’s birth, first compelled Christopher to give the toddler to Mama B and Aunt Jess to be raised. Because his father thus disappeared from the boy’s childhood, Jeremy is understandably conflicted over his return, uncertain in his feelings both toward the women who loved and raised him and toward the new family—his father’s second wife Carol and their children—that he’s related to mostly by strangeness. Jeremy’s encounters with childhood friends, and his reminiscences with Jess, one of Carol’s children, provide Jackson opportunity to reconstruct the finer details of Jeremy’s estrangement from his father and the context surrounding it. But the disparity between what needs to be known here to let the drama emerge and the amount that is made known can give the feel of an interesting short story’s being expanded to the size of a novel. The wait is long before we learn what the hard secret was behind Christopher’s abandonment of his son—even though that secret’s surprising twists are in many respects worth the wait and offer an intriguing and variant contribution to the theme of the “disintegrating African-American family.” Moving in its core idea—and in its ending—but Jackson, overall, has plumped too many narrative calories into an otherwise lean, and nicely told, story. (Author tour)

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-671-56893-0

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Pocket

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE QUEEN OF HARLEM
by Brian Keith Jackson

- BOOK REVIEW
THE VIEW FROM HERE
by Brian Keith Jackson

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DISTANT SHORES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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.