A plaintive novel of social protest, originally published in Spanish in 1982, whose targets are the oppressive mine owners of northern Mexico and a Catholic Church that condemns its parishioners for daring to dream of better lives. Montemayor, a veteran novelist with impressive academic and literary credentials, structures his fervent tale of one impoverished family's ordeal less as a narrative than as a series of meditations that focus recurring attention on pivotal remembered incidents, emotions, and images. His protagonist, Refugio, a younger son prevented from working in the mines by his father and elder brother, is thus ``saved''—to struggle to support his own growing family, and to bury those whom the mines claim, seeing prefigured in their deaths his own, and those of others yet to be born. Refugio's memories of the demise of his grandfather and namesake (in 1931) are juxtaposed with the emotional experience of losing his beloved brother Antonio (in 1955), and with regularly interpolated burlesques of several sacraments, which express with bitter irony the church's lordly contempt for the body and senses and its injunctions to forgo even minimal pleasures and creature comforts (``May God forgive you for living''). The novel virtually eschews dramatic action (it's almost a shock when Refugio recalls his grandfather's tales of matching wits with Pancho Villa) but attains a haunting reality in its creation of a heat-and-dust- clogged landscape where hills cast shadows as if they're animals, and everything seen suggests the omnipresence of suffocation and death (young Refugio, noting his brother grown old beyond his years, ``felt as if someone were throwing handfuls of dirt in my face''; grandfather Refugio throws stones as far away from him as possible, sensing they'll be part of the weight pressing on him after he is dead and buried). Both less and more than a novel, this moving story—appearing in English for the first time—is given unity and resonance by the intensity of its imagery.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-917635-16-7
Page Count: 118
Publisher: Academy Chicago
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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