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THE GREAT INLAND SEA

Name: THE GREAT INLAND SEA
Author: David Francis
ISBN: 1-59692-116-1

by David Francis ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 10, 2005

Spare prose, startling images and an emotional landscape as harsh as the setting.

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A bleak coming-of-age debut set in 1940s New South Wales.

Narrator Day, the son of a Viennese Jewish soprano and a rough monosyllabic Scotsman, is 12 when he witnesses his father, Darwin, tying and gagging his mother in bed each night. His mother had been in declining mental health for several years, since a miscarriage and her discovery that her husband was having an affair with Lelonie, a woman who lives and works on their ranch. Then one night, Day sees his father bury his mother in the red sand on the rise by the billabong. She has suffocated. Day runs away, first to the mud brick hut of Leonie, who takes him in overnight (hiding under her bed when his father appears, he finds himself the unwilling witness to their lovemaking). Then he heads to Melbourne, gets a job working with horses and dreams of being a jockey. At 18, he is shipped to a horse farm in Maryland, along with a racehorse named Unusual. He works hard, meets a girl by the name Callie, who also wants to be a jockey, and is drawn into a nocturnal game in which Callie, her groom and he take bets and run races for money. Day is haunted by memories of his mother and of Dickie, the man she seemed attracted to (and who may be his father). Meanwhile, Callie takes off, and Day finds her only six months later, but it seems she’s with another man. He moves to L.A., trains horses, then heads back to Australia, confronts his father and learns some family secrets. Callie sends for him to ride in a race in Mexico, and together they track down Dickie in Santa Barbara. This odd threesome heads down to Australia when Darwin has a stroke. With all the players in one place, Day learns how far he can trust Callie, Dickie and Darwin.

Spare prose, startling images and an emotional landscape as harsh as the setting.

Pub Date: May 10, 2005

ISBN: 1-59692-116-1

Page Count: 258

Publisher: MacAdam/Cage

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.