A sublimely sensitive war tale rendered in exquisite language.
A Civil War novel chronicles a teenager’s participation in the Battle of Natural Bridge as a Confederate soldier and his life in the defeated South.
In March 1865, Virgil Hill is a military student at the West Florida Seminary and nearly 17 years old. Yankee soldiers intend to cross the Natural Bridge over the St. Marks River before they march into Florida’s state capital, Tallahassee. Gen. Sam Jones and his second-in-command, Gen. William Miller, realize they desperately need to recruit as many able-bodied men as possible to push back the Union Army, and that necessity is the magnet that draws Virgil into the war. On the way, he meets Neil Clary, a New Orleans native wizened by adversity—he’s only three years older than Virgil, but no one would ever guess that. Neil confesses that he’s a deserter—he ran away from the Tennessee Army, carrying the identification papers belonging to another man, which he is incapable of reading. He asks Virgil to write a letter for him to Ella Mayfield, a girlfriend devotedly waiting for his return. But Neil doesn’t survive the great Battle of Natural Bridge, hauntingly described by Abrams (A Piece of Bad Luck, 1995) in poetically stylized prose: “It is hard to stay collected at first. Hundreds of wild-eyed devils come firing and the high snarl, the sigh of lead looking hard for you can quicken the blood, make you grit your teeth.” Once the battle is won, Virgil treks back to the family farm and attempts to find his missing father, to no avail. He then travels in search of Ella, dedicated to giving her a ring Neil wore, and ends up working on her farm for months, lost between strenuous labor and burgeoning love. Abrams captivatingly depicts the atmosphere at the time—many of the Union soldiers attempting to cross the Natural Bridge are black, and few in the Confederate units have ever seen armed black men before. The sense of prideful triumph from the victory quickly evaporates into despair following Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender. Virgil is intriguingly complex, especially for such a young man—never a slave owner but still furious over the South’s loss, he is steadfastly unwilling to submit himself to despair, though he considers his youth spent. The author’s writing is an unusual mélange of period dialect and lyrical meditation, which creates a mood saturated in gravity: “I saw that the body remained in varying degrees of holes and rents, but that the main ingredient had moved away. The dead are not there anymore, is what I saw, and that the body alone is but a paltry affair and no more than a house abandoned.” Readers who fancy Faulkner—both for his expressive prose and his authentic portrayals of the American South—are likely to find in Abrams a kindred literary spirit. The novel’s pace plods a bit in the second half but never fully becomes slothful, and even that modest lethargy is more than compensated for by the intelligence and refinement of the prose.
A sublimely sensitive war tale rendered in exquisite language.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60489-217-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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