A ruthless but absorbing and provocative reshaping of the idea that the girlfriend dies, again.
In a slim book of linked short stories, Valente (The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home, 2016, etc.) frees the voices of women from the world of comic-book superheroes.
In Deadtown, Valente’s vividly imagined land of the dead, a group of dead women gather at the Lethe Cafe to share their stories with each other. They call themselves the Hell Hath Club, and they have each suffered, disastrously and violently, through their relationships with superheroes. Paige Embry was a lab intern who created a mysterious substance that turned her boyfriend into the crime-fighting Kid Mercury and spawned a supervillain. Julia Ash was a superhero in her own right, with powers that grew ever stronger and eventually turned her fellow superheroes against her. Samantha Dane embodied the term that inspired the title of the book: she was an actual woman in a refrigerator, gruesomely murdered to serve as a plot device in the narrative of her boyfriend and his freshly minted powers. The world of the Hell Hath Club is packed with delightful details—in the land of the dead, the entertainment is excellent and includes burned-down theaters, forgotten songs, and all the beloved rock stars and actresses the world has lost—and enough solidity that you can imagine the comics these characters might have come from even though they do not exist. The stories are entertaining but not a romp. Valente chooses to eschew the soothing route of “saving” her heroines or even letting them save themselves. Instead, she gives them strong voices and allows them to rage, mourn, and regret. She gives them, and the reader, the chance to be furious at the common use of death and incapacitation of women as lazy plot points and reminds us that other stories are always possible.
A ruthless but absorbing and provocative reshaping of the idea that the girlfriend dies, again.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4814-5934-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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
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
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