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
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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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