A compelling Southern narrative that effectively develops its engaging characters.
Debut author Anderson offers a richly textured, coming-of-age novel based on true events.
In the 1960s, Lunda Rose wants more than anything to escape her family and the narrow, suffocating backwater Tennessee mountain town of Maynard Bald in which they live. Her home life is claustrophobic and full of violence; she watches her father, a neon sign maker, knock a screen door off its hinges, put his foot through the TV, and break furniture at various points. Worse, she witnesses him disfiguring her mother’s face: “There we saw Daddy holding a piece of broken neon glass to her right temple.” Daddy exerts a powerful malevolence in this narrative, even when he mysteriously disappears from the home for months at a time. At other times, he repeatedly moves the family to different houses and different states, often in the middle of the night, abandoning furniture, pots and pans, and other personal belongings along the way. Anderson lays bare the secret, dark world that Lunda Rose and her siblings, Elda Kate and Robert Joseph, inhabit, and she perfectly captures the voice of the insightful, spunky young narrator. Lunda Rose’s reflections on her Cherokee grandmother, Lillie, further deepen the narrative: Lillie delighted in what she called her “dithyrambs,” prophetic songs that she hummed through toothless gums. Grandmother’s taste in literature—James Joyce, Henrik Ibsen, Tennessee Williams—also provides context for Anderson to explore deeper themes and ideas by evoking past masters, as Lunda Rose attempts to attain personal wisdom through reading. After Lunda Rose discovers Daddy’s awful secret—one that deeply and negatively affects everyone around him—the story loses some dramatic force. However, it continues to explore more subtle territory as the protagonist tests her ability to leave a place to which she finds herself tethered.
A compelling Southern narrative that effectively develops its engaging characters.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9968049-0-5
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Abednigo Hogge Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
