A compelling and brooding read.
The title hints at the tone, for this is indeed a Southern gothic story, set in Kentucky and focused on a man who would do anything to keep his family together.
Offutt's (My Father, the Pornographer, 2015, etc.) first fiction in almost two decades opens in 1954, when Tucker is coming back from the Korean War with 11 medals—and he’s not even 18. On the way home through rural Kentucky he stops a man from raping Rhonda, a 14-year-old girl, and he finds the potential rapist is not only the girl’s uncle, but also the deputy sheriff. Rhonda and her rescuer rather casually decide to marry, and Tucker makes a living making moonshine runs for Beanpole, an unfathomably corrupt, 350-pound colossus. The narrative then shifts to 1964, when Tucker and Rhonda have five children the state is threatening to remove from their home. It turns out that of the five, only Jo is “right,” the others having varying degrees of physical or emotional disability. But disabilities or not, Tucker and Rhonda love them all and don’t want the family separated. Blind with rage, Tucker hunts down and kills the social worker who was most adamant about taking his children. Using his connections, Beanpole gets Tucker a reduced sentence, but prison ultimately becomes a place where “Tucker retreated further into himself while increasing his vigilance” against fellow prisoners out to get him. The final part of the novel takes place when Tucker is released in 1971. He feels Beanpole cheated him when he was incarcerated, and now he’s looking for revenge. Offutt has a fine ear for Kentucky-speak and is able to make small shifts in vocabulary that capture the rhythms of rural conversation (“Hidy....Come on up and set a spell”). And Tucker is a knotty and complex character—warm and loving toward his family but cold and threatening toward almost everyone else.
A compelling and brooding read.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2779-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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
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
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