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
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
