An engrossing tale of survival and redemption in the Pacific Northwest.
In this novel, the lives of two girls intersect in the woods of Washington state.
Ten-year-old Agate “Aggie” Hayes loves nothing more than climbing the massive fir trees that stand near her family’s home and sketching the bird nests she finds there. But her mother has instructed the girl to remain on the ground—climbing is too dangerous—and Aggie is wary of tempting her unstable parent’s anger. Sulking over a recent punishment, Aggie lights a small campfire that unintentionally torches the woods by her family’s cabin and burns it to the ground. Believing her parents dead in the blaze, Aggie flees into the wilderness, afraid of what might happen if she’s blamed for the crime. Meanwhile, 16-year-old Celia Burke is left by her father at her grandmother’s house for an indeterminate amount of time, far away from her friends back in Houston. She plans to skip town at the first opportunity, but when she hears of the fire at the Hayes home—and the fact that the daughter, Aggie, is missing—she can’t help but get invested. (Particularly after getting a peek at one of the other searchers, the handsome Cabot Dulcie.) As Aggie tries to stay alive and Celia attempts to find her, their stories become increasingly intertwined. Bostrom’s prose is propulsive and detailed, as here where Aggie cleans up after a scavenged lunch to avoid detection: “Rousing, she poured the rest of her seed into the bottle with the milk, pushed the waxy lid back into place, and scattered duff over her makeshift kitchen to erase it. No walkers or riders or dogs would stumble over her.” Aggie is a wonderfully magnetic character: a scrappy, stubborn preteen whose father has taught her to survive off the land. Celia balances out the tale with her suburban angst and sarcasm, but the supporting characters are equally strong, including the teenager’s bird biologist grandmother and Aggie’s autistic brother, Burnaby. The book contains an unexpected villain as well, who provides some added danger to the mix. While not always completely believable, the story is a true page-turner all the way to the end.
An engrossing tale of survival and redemption in the Pacific Northwest.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64742-068-0
Page Count: 328
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Sometimes funny, sometimes silly, sometimes quite sad—i.e., an accurate portrait of life in one's 50s.
The further adventures of Candace and her man-eating friends.
Bushnell (Killing Monica, 2015, etc.) has been mining the vein of gold she hit with Sex and the City (1996) in both adult and YA novels. The current volume, billed as fiction but calling its heroine Candace rather than Carrie, is a collection of commentaries and recounted hijinks (and lojinks) close in spirit to the original. The author tries Tinder on assignment for a magazine, explores "cubbing" (dating men in their 20s who prefer older women), investigates the "Mona Lisa" treatment (a laser makeover for the vagina), and documents the ravages of Middle Aged Madness (MAM, the female version of the midlife crisis) on her clique of friends, a couple of whom come to blows at a spa retreat. One of the problems of living in Madison World, as she calls her neighborhood in the city, is trying to stay out of the clutches of a group of Russians who are dead-set on selling her skin cream that costs $15,000. Another is that one inevitably becomes a schlepper, carrying one's entire life around in "handbags the size of burlap sacks and worn department store shopping bags and plastic grocery sacks....Your back ached and your feet hurt, but you just kept on schlepping, hoping for the day when something magical would happen and you wouldn't have to schlep no more." She finds some of that magic by living part-time in a country place she calls the Village (clearly the Hamptons), where several of her old group have retreated. There, in addition to cubs, they find SAPs, Senior Age Players, who are potential candidates for MNB, My New Boyfriend. Will Candace get one?
Sometimes funny, sometimes silly, sometimes quite sad—i.e., an accurate portrait of life in one's 50s.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4726-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
This genuine page-turner offers a whiff of white liberal self-congratulation that won’t hurt its appeal and probably spells...
The relationships between white middle-class women and their black maids in Jackson, Miss., circa 1962, reflect larger issues of racial upheaval in Mississippi-native Stockett’s ambitious first novel.
Still unmarried, to her mother’s dismay, recent Ole Miss graduate Skeeter returns to Jackson longing to be a serious writer. While playing bridge with her friends Hilly and Elizabeth, she asks Elizabeth’s seemingly docile maid Aibileen for housekeeping advice to fill the column she’s been hired to pen for a local paper. The two women begin what Skeeter considers a semi-friendship, but Aibileen, mourning her son’s recent death and devoted to Elizabeth’s neglected young daughter, is careful what she shares. Aibileen’s good friend Minnie, who works for Hilly’s increasingly senile mother, is less adept at playing the subservient game than Aibileen. When Hilly, an aggressively racist social climber, fires and then blackballs her for speaking too freely, Minnie’s audacious act of vengeance almost destroys her livelihood. Unlike oblivious Elizabeth and vicious Hilly, Skeeter is at the verge of enlightenment. Encouraged by a New York editor, she decides to write a book about the experience of black maids and enlists Aibileen’s help. For Skeeter the book is primarily a chance to prove herself as a writer. The stakes are much higher for the black women who put their lives on the line by telling their true stories. Although the exposé is published anonymously, the town’s social fabric is permanently torn. Stockett uses telling details to capture the era and does not shy from showing Skeeter’s dangerous naïveté. Skeeter’s narration is alive with complexity—her loyalty to her traditional Southern mother remains even after she learns why the beloved black maid who raised her has disappeared. In contrast, Stockett never truly gets inside Aibileen and Minnie’s heads (a risk the author acknowledges in her postscript). The scenes written in their voices verge on patronizing.
This genuine page-turner offers a whiff of white liberal self-congratulation that won’t hurt its appeal and probably spells big success.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-399-15534-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Amy Einhorn/Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
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