paper 1-55659-132-2 Best known for his narrative poems about pigs and pig farming, Lee (So. Utah State Univ.) relies on the same down-home style, with its southern-fried diction and affected spellings (’sed,— —oncet,— —othern—), to spin a collection of charming tales. With some characters reappearing from previous volumes, Lee unifies these chatty poems by having them all overheard at the local cafÇ, a —place / to get morning coffee and hear a good story or the news.— Digressive and anecdotal, his longish verses favor —legends and opinions— over fact and include the story behind the unlikely name of the coffeehouse, —Wayburne Pig CafÇ,— which derives from a sorry account of the owner’s venture into hog farming. Many of the narratives enlarge in the retelling: signing up men for a softball team (—The Wayburne Team—) evolves into a heated discussion of a local prostitute with a dead-eye aim; a fight between two good old boys (—Blow—) is interrupted by a tornado; a local man lost in the Montana woods (—The Relic—) survives lest his estranged wife get his entire estate; and of course there’s a whopper of a fish tale (—The Fish—), this one about a fellow who comes home drunk with lots of fish, which, in a standoff of foul proportions, his wife refuses to clean. Lee smartly intersperses among his lengthy tales some shorter poems, mostly songs overheard in the graveyard by E.E. Washburn, a cemetery worker who communes with the dead. The weaker poems narrow into their punch-lines, and there’s more than a little Lil— Abner—like hokum, but Lee’s country yucks are almost always entertaining, and Copper Canyon has wisely released this volume with a separate fat collection of his past work, A Legacy of Shadows.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55659-131-4
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Copper Canyon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
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
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