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
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
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