The construction business is on solid ground, the bureau is a little shaky.
The careers of a homebuilder and a bureaucrat converge on the booming fringe of Ottawa.
McAdam’s debut flexes considerable muscle once it settles down from a jittery beginning in the minds of Jerry McGuinty, an understandably inarticulate, up-from-nothing builder and his cirrhotic, delusional, estranged wife Kathleen. Carefully constructing McGuinty’s progress up the ranks from gofer to drywall drudge to plaster artist to developer, McAdam tackles concurrently the rise of Simon Struthers, a thoroughly unpleasant bureaucrat, a bachelor with a bad habit of boffing the wives of his co-workers and, when appropriate, his co-workers. Struthers, son of an MP, independently wealthy, and totally amoral, drifts into semipotency in a department with controls over city development, a course that will place his one real project, a greenbelt, square in the path of Jerry McGuinty’s subdivisions. McGuinty’s ambitions and work ethic absorb him totally and leave him oblivious both to Irish-born Kathleen’s hard-to-miss alcoholism and to the wretched life of their only son. He also manages to miss the fact that Kathleen pretty much loathes him and would gladly chuck husband, son, and the succession of bigger homes to return to her loose life running a lunch wagon from one construction site to the next. What works here is the portrait of Jerry and the insight into the rough world and odd priorities of the people who shape the houses most of us live in and are occasionally mystified by. Less believable is the utter corruption of the urban mandarin who, when he is not meddling with progress, spends an astonishing amount of time peering into the windows of his ladyloves, one of whom is much, much too young. The disintegration of the McGuintys’ wretched family is made palatable by a clever denouement that knits up the ambitions of the two men.
The construction business is on solid ground, the bureau is a little shaky.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-101028-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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