A novel within a novel that’s well worth a read.
McRaven (Build Me a Tower, 2016, etc.) offers a tale of violence, revenge, and love in the early American republic, interlocked with a love story set two centuries later.
In the late 1700s, Adam Kyle is a noted Revolutionary War gunsmith whose young wife and two children are killed when an infamous villain known as Red Beard shoots it out with a ragtag militia. Adam pursues him from Pennsylvania all the way to the Carolinas, where, he’s told, Red Beard dies of his wounds and lowland fever. A broken Adam moves to eastern Tennessee to try to begin anew. Two hundred years down the line, David Kyle, one of Adam’s many descendants, is a restorer of cabins (just as author McRaven is). His cousin Dane’s widow, Harriet, has inherited a piece of property with a run-down cabin on it—the very cabin that Adam built for his betrothed, Constance Green, so many years ago. David and Harriet fall in love, and while restoring the cabin, they discover an old manuscript telling the true story of Adam, his courtship of Constance, and his dealings with the mysterious, ambitious John Cabell. A sidebar to this story involves the legendary “super rifle” that Adam built for Cabell, since lost. Gradually, Adam and others begin to suspect that there is something mysterious about Cabell—something, in fact, that’s unsavory. In good time and dramatic fashion, the storylines of the Kyle clan of eastern Tennessee come to a ripping conclusion. Overall, McRaven is a talented writer who’s created, in David, an especially believable and likable narrator. At the same time that David and Harriet are editing the manuscript that they discovered in the cabin, the author cleverly depicts David restoring the cabin itself, showing how Adam and his story are in the process of being figuratively restored. Readers also get some intriguing snippets of McRaven’s own expertise (smithing, masonry, and so on) along the way.
A novel within a novel that’s well worth a read.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944962-37-1
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Secant Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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