An often moving account of abuse and second chances, although its stiff prose sometimes gets in the way.
In LaFrey’s somber debut novel, a young girl, her baby brother, and her “walking disaster” of a mother search for a new place to call home.
Young Rita only sees her mom, Coral, on Christmases and birthdays. She spends the rest of the year with her grandparents, who took her in after Coral—who wasted her teen years skipping school, partying, and serving a stint in juvenile detention—abandoned her newborn daughter and first husband. Rita’s grandmother proves to be an affectionate, stabilizing guardian, but her grandfather, scarred by a car accident, keeps the family on edge with his mood swings and physically abusive behavior. When Grandma dies, Coral returns to care for her daughter; she also has a new baby boy, Toby. After they’re evicted from their apartment, they wander from one makeshift home to another, including the basement of a distant great-aunt, a dilapidated former motel, and a low-income housing complex whose shady neighbors tempt Coral to return to her pot-smoking, promiscuous ways. That leaves the family “stuck in an old car with a half tank of gas, twenty bucks…and no place to go,” so they head west to Nevada to stay with Bart, a pen-pal whom Coral hopes will be her boyfriend. As told from Rita’s perspective, the book maintains an eerily detached tone that’s most effective when detailing the family’s cycle of abuse: “Right then, I was too happy to be very cautious around my mom, even though she had just punched me in the face several days earlier, over something she imagined I had done.” Other times, the prose takes too much time to say not quite enough. Too many adverb-laden sentences (“Abruptly, I sighed deeply before grudgingly making my way over to the fence”) slow down the narrative’s momentum and distract from its emotional center. The story ends rather suddenly, but LaFrey plans to continue the saga of Rita, Coral, and Toby in the next volume of her Fateful Consequences series.
An often moving account of abuse and second chances, although its stiff prose sometimes gets in the way.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1480809086
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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