Good-natured, often funny, but excessively complicated tale that matches a people-eating demon against his reluctant master and the citizens of a small California town. First-novelist Moore throws in more plot twists than the Pacific Coast highway has curves. He obviously knows and is amused by the flawed but feisty denizens with which he inhabits Pine Grove, south of the Big Sur wilderness area. To this tourist town comes Travis O'Hearn, a 20-year-old who, 70 years before, got saddled with a demon, Catch, who gave him eternal youth plus problems. Catch is sometimes under Travis's control but often not, particularly when he's hungry. Travis wants out, namely by finding an incantation that will return the demon to Hell. On Travis's side are the King of the Djinns and August Brine, Pine Grove's purveyor of bait, tackle, and fine wines. Others who swell the cast past overflowing include waitress Jenny and her estranged, alcoholic husband Robert; tough old Mavis, who owns the Head of the Slug bar (it had been Head of the Wolf until animal-rights activists leaned on her); retired woodcarving codger Effrom and his wife Amanda; hotel night auditor Billy Winston, who flirts with other males by computer modem while wearing red silk panties; once-battered Rachael, who runs a coven to empower women through worship of the Goddess; and Detective Sergeant Alfonse Rivera, who fears he will end up bagging microwave burritos at a 7-Eleven unless he nails down a case. The author's youthful high spirits, insight into small-town people, and comic brashness help to overcome the fact that too many characters jump through too many hoops with too much unnecessary hocus-pocus.
Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1992
ISBN: 0-312-07069-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1991
A compulsively readable melodrama.
After her father’s sudden death, a daughter discovers disturbing facts about a sister presumed dead more than two decades earlier.
One way or another, Lisa MacPherson, a musical prodigy, has always dominated the lives of her family. By the age of 17, she's a violin virtuoso with a bright future. Unaccountably, on a winter morning, Lisa’s kayak (though not her body) is discovered in the ice-bound Potomac near the family’s Alexandria, Virginia, home. Shortly after the tragedy, the family moves to North Carolina. Lisa’s younger siblings, Danny, 7, and Riley, 2, will be told only that Lisa suffered from depression and committed suicide. Twenty-three years later, Riley, who has become a high school guidance counselor to help depressed teens like Lisa, is settling her father Frank’s affairs after his death from a heart attack. (Her mother had succumbed to cancer years before.) While getting ready to sell his North Carolina real estate—her childhood home and a trailer park—Riley runs across several people who harbor secrets about her family’s past: Danny, a mentally troubled Iraq War vet, nurses grudges against his parents while living as a virtual hermit on the outskirts of the trailer park. Her father’s friend Tom exhibits a threatening mien. Jeannie, another family friend, appears helpful, but what is she hiding? Riley discovers that her father was paying Tom off, but why? Early on, Lisa’s voice, and her version of events, emerges. We learn that she was accused of murdering her violin teacher and was about to stand trial. Her suicide was faked by her father and Tom, both ex-U.S. Marshals skilled at making people disappear. Her father relocated her to San Diego, where, ignoring Frank’s warnings to avoid music, she found new outlets for her extraordinary talent. Although the plot is not exactly watertight, the revelations are parceled out so skillfully that disbelief remains suspended until the satisfying if not entirely plausible close.
A compulsively readable melodrama.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-01071-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fine first novel that enlivens familiar themes of parenthood and battles against nature.
A couple struggling to settle in the Alaskan wilderness is heartened by the arrival of the child of their dreams—or are they literally dreaming her?
Jack and Mabel, the protagonists of Ivey’s assured debut, are a couple in their early 50s who take advantage of cheap land to build a homestead in Alaska in the 1920s. But the work is backbreaking, the winters are brutally cold and their isolation only reminds them of their childlessness. There’s a glimmer of sunshine, however, in the presence of a mysterious girl who lurks near their cabin. Though she’s initially skittish, in time she becomes a fixture in the couple's lives. Ivey takes her time in clarifying whether or not the girl, Faina, is real or not, and there are good reasons to believe she’s a figment of Jack and Mabel’s imaginations: She’s a conveniently helpful good-luck charm for them in their search for food, none of their neighbors seem to have seen the girl and she can’t help but remind Mabel of fairy tales she heard in her youth about a snow child. The mystery of Faina’s provenance, along with the way she brightens the couple’s lives, gives the novel’s early chapters a slightly magical-realist cast. Yet as Faina’s identity grows clearer, the narrative also becomes a more earthbound portrait of the Alaskan wilderness and a study of the hard work involved in building a family. Ivey’s style is spare and straightforward, in keeping with the novel’s setting, and she offers enough granular detail about hunting and farming to avoid familiar pieties about the Last Frontier. The book’s tone throughout has a lovely push and pull—Alaska’s punishing landscape and rough-hewn residents pitted against Faina’s charmed appearances—and the ending is both surprising and earned.
A fine first novel that enlivens familiar themes of parenthood and battles against nature.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-316-17567-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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