bookshelf

ROCKET CITY

Name: ROCKET CITY
Author: Cathryn Alpert
ISBN: 1-878448-62-5

by Cathryn Alpert ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 31, 1995

bookshelf

Chatty, amiable first novel set in Alamogordo (``Rocket City'') New Mexico. Storywriter Alpert (Best of the West 5, etc.) offers two modestly skewed love affairs here. First, there's that of art- therapist Marilee Levitay, 25, a likable, ordinary woman who quits her job to chase after her boyfriend, a New Age twerp who works for the Air Force in Alamogordo. On her way across the White Sands Missile Range, she picks up a hitchhiker named Enoch, a dwarf who can walk only with crutches. Nothing could be more unlikely than an affair between these two, so, naturally, Alpert skewers the boyfriend, and after several gentle adventures, Marilee and Enoch have a wild night. Second, there's 40-year-old Louis T. Figman, a hypochondriac who works in LA as an insurance adjuster. He deals exclusively with ``accidental death and dismemberment'' but has managed to keep his emotional distance through the years, until one day he's involved in an accident himself. Simultaneously, Figman has convinced himself that he's dying, and, under an assumed name, he flees to Alamogordo, where he attempts, amusingly, to become a painter. He grows lonely and chases after a 20-year-old grocery clerk—who turns out to be as banal as the reader suspects she will—when right under his nose, with a salty older woman, true love awaits. Alpert crosses the two storylines just once, in a bar scene with a host of dwarves that brings to mind Katherine Dunn's Geek Love. Meanwhile, she runs her character all over the New Mexico backcountry but does little with rockets, military life, or the heritage of the atomic bomb. And her moral is exactly this profound: Love is where you find it. Still, boy-meets-girl never grows old, and, particularly with the ridiculous Figman, newcomer Alpert strikes a pleasing tone.

Pub Date: May 31, 1995

ISBN: 1-878448-62-5

Page Count: 347

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

bookshelf

CARRIE

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 1974

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...

bookshelf

Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).

All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."

Pub Date: April 8, 1974

ISBN: 0385086954

Page Count: 216

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
OTHER WORLDS THAN THESE
by Stephen King & Peter Straub

- BOOK REVIEW
NEVER FLINCH
by Stephen King

- BOOK REVIEW
YOU LIKE IT DARKER
by Stephen King

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Carrie Turns 40

- SEEN & HEARD
Stephen King Used ‘Carrie’ Advance To Support Mom

- BOOK TO SCREEN
New ‘Carrie’ Series in the Works at Amazon

bookshelf

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

bookshelf

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.