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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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