A first novel from Australian writer Bird about a Tasmanian town, its inhabitants, and a replica of a town built under a glass dome: a delightful fable whose parts fit together with the integrity of a Joseph Cornell miniature. Reality and fantasy meet in this tale set in Copperfield, a little bush town that turns ghostly but is rebuilt under a glass dome by The Best People as the Historic Museum Village—''the Disneyland of the Antarctic.'' In 1985, Bedrock Mean is the only inhabitant of the original town (as opposed to the replica). She's the mother of Lovelygod, a midget-child born in 1960 who disappeared in 1970 and has never been found—and who is now a figure of near-legend. Mean's brother Carrillo went looking for Lovelygod and ended up ``running some center for the finding of lost children in America.'' Virginia O'Day also figures prominently: she lived in Copperfield as a teen-ager and became a writer. We're treated to her early diaries, to a series of interviews with her, and even to letters she wrote to Charles Dickens (``The trouble is, I am a girl''). Then the narrative magically doubles back on itself when it changes point of view; and, finally, after poetic prose and meditations on extinction, after lovely pseudo-history and reflections by O'Day (``It seems to be a very Australian story, the story of Lovelygod. Children disappear without a trace''), we come round to ``A Reader's Guide to the Bluebird Cafe,'' where various people and places are defined in glossary fashion. A curious fable, then, written with the precision of a Nabokov, that creates its own world and makes that world vital. Bird manages in brief sections to construct an odd and endearing place, filled with its unique inhabitants: a sweet-natured looking- glass version of Twin Peaks.
Pub Date: April 29, 1991
ISBN: 0-8112-1156-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
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
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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