Sometimes a bit heavy on the atmosphere but nonetheless an affecting thriller that mixes just the right gothic chills with...
An erotic and creepy debut about an Australian teacher who tempts fate by sleeping with the father of one of her students.
In a small town in Tasmania, the just-out-of-college Kate Byrne is carrying on an affair with Thomas, the distant and rather callous father of Lucien, a member of Kate’s fourth-grade class. Besides the usual worries about discovery, Kate is increasingly preoccupied with Thomas’s wife, Veronica, who has just published a true crime book called Murder at Black Swan Point, about a case whose similarities to Kate’s situation are more than a little troubling: a mother who discovers that her husband is having an affair with the younger woman who works at his clinic—and has sometimes watched after their kids—kills the adulteress and then disappears. Kate is concerned also about Lucien, a gifted and almost preternaturally wise child whose writing and drawings are full of anger and death—perhaps brought on by his presumably cold home life and Veronica’s grisly research. Disagreeing with many of the conclusions in Veronica’s book, Kate spends time imagining her own version, hers told by indigenous animals and targeted at children—with fanciful little shards of this story slotted in between the novel’s increasingly claustrophobic and surreal chapters. Hooper—a confident if occasionally show-offy first-timer—doesn’t provide much forward movement; the narrative progresses mostly in Kate’s head as memories of her own past blur into her imaginings of other people’s pasts and presents. At first, it’s difficult to see why Kate would ever willingly thrust herself into such a precarious position, setting herself up to be dealt with in a bloody fashion by a murder-obsessed Veronica, but Hooper deftly manuevers the reader to Kate’s fragile point of view, with its obsessions—killing, writing—that are reminiscent of Susanna Moore’s In the Cut.
Sometimes a bit heavy on the atmosphere but nonetheless an affecting thriller that mixes just the right gothic chills with erotically charged suspense.Pub Date: March 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-2512-0
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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