With its subzero temperatures that will make you reach for a blanket and a wounded but never weakened heroine, Kells'...
A plane crash in the Rockies leaves more than physical scars on an up-and-coming competitive college swimmer.
Kells expertly ratchets up the tension in her thrilling debut novel as she shifts back and forth between the frigid Colorado wilderness and chlorinated pools. Sophomore Avery Delacorte is excited to make her mark on the cutthroat college swimming circuit far from her native Boston and her controlling father. But when she takes a crowded flight back east for Thanksgiving, along with fellow swimmer Colin Shea, the plane goes down in the Rockies. After the first day, Avery, Colin and three little boys—Tim, 6, Liam, 4, and toddler Aayu—are the only survivors. It would be easy to keep readers in suspense about the group's overall fate, but Kells makes the more interesting choice to alternate among the events leading up to the crash, the five-day wilderness ordeal and Avery's bumpy recovery. It's clear early on that the press' version of the story and the truth are not one and the same, but Kells cleverly teases out exactly how the two accounts differ as readers come to learn more about Avery, particularly her complicated relationships with Colin and with the sport of swimming itself. The children, and their growing adoration for their surrogate forest parents in the wake of the crash that orphaned them, are integral to the story and as such are realistically depicted, much to Kells' credit.
With its subzero temperatures that will make you reach for a blanket and a wounded but never weakened heroine, Kells' assured debut is a winner.Pub Date: March 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95493-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
The talented Crone's third collection (The Winnebago Mysteries, 1982; A Period of Confinement, 1986) shows that she still has a giftof heart, eye, and earin these eight stories of ordinary people living in today's Louisiana. Leading off is the longish title piece: a real-estate agent's tale of a local beauty's brief fame in Hollywood, then her retreat home and slow decline into a life of scandal, sorrow, and loneliness, as if there's no escape from the ancient script of Old Southern Gothic``Is this 1988?'' asks the ex-actress at one point; ``Can't we drive a stake through Faulkner's heart?'' Crone as author grants and exploits the influence of the Old Southin atmosphere, tradition, detail, sense of placeand yet she also portrays her characters less as ``southerners'' than as people who happen to live in the South. A divorced couple meet for dinner to discuss their daughter's choice of schooland realize that someday, conceivably, they'll remarry (``There is a River in New Orleans''); a young girl whose brother ``has'' to get married recognizes her father's terrible insensitivity (``I Am Eleven''); and a daughter isn't sure she can forgive God for her mother's death (``Crocheting''). Some of the stories grow fainter with the slightness of their charactersa photographer lusts for a woman who once modeled for him (``Desire''); a young husband tumbles into adultery (``Fever''); another falls for a visiting artist from Norway (``Oslo'')but Crone's control of texture and tone remain strong even then. And throughout, there's a consistency of pleasure to be had simply from this writer's gift of expressiveness, as in the case of the young man in ``Gaugin'' who, deciding to remain in Louisiana rather than move back north, ``was overcome by a sweet homesickness for the very moment he was living innot the next one, not one somewhere else.'' From an appealing author, stories that, at their best, are more than commonly authentic, capable, and moving.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-87805-813-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
From the much-praised Scottish author Galloway (The Trick Is to Keep Breathing, 1994, etc.), an intermittently amusing warts- and-all story of two unmarried Scotswomen on a dreary French holiday, told in brittle flakes of self-consciously modern writing. Rona and Cassie are both in their 30s. Rona can drive the rattling automobile, Cassie can't; Rona smilingly finds a solution to various problems, Cassie sulkily thinks negative-but-true thoughts: ``...they would drink the coffee in silence, warding off the impending tip question...Foreign countries jesus. An interminable two weeks of this to come.'' As the two zig and zag through a bleakly downcast vision of roadside attractions and detours, Cassie relives her past with old boyfriends in accounts starting back when Cassie was a lower-class tourist awed by the London Tube and ending on nudist beaches in Albaniathat are delightfully awful: ``Tom. Happy as a pig in shit. Rows of compact arses turning their cheeks up to the sun in the guinness-coloured ovals of his shades.'' The novel finds a vein of life in these scenes more dense and powerful than in most of Rona's and Cassie's present-time misadventures, even adding in Galloway's didactic lectures about men, life, and the futility of escape through love or tourism: or after sitting through an homage to Molly Bloom's Ulysses monologuein which Cassie expresses both her longing for men and her disgust of themby which time one will be drumming one's fingertips in impatience. Well-observed scenes of quotidian France and hilariously downbeat details of modern love can't overcome the book's end-reliance on a sentimental, simplistic teaserwill Cassie and Rona become a romantic couple?and leaving the question of love for the next holiday trip only further postpones the drama in this one. A Thelma and Louise without the guns, the adventure, or even the convertible.
Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1995
ISBN: 1-56478-082-1
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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