MOON TIDE

Name: MOON TIDE
Author: Dawn Clifton Tripp
ISBN: 0-375-50844-9

by Dawn Clifton Tripp ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 15, 2003

Lots of nicely rendered, physically specific details about farming, fishing, and hunting in the first third of the 20th...

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Lyrical first novel, enraptured by nature and language, traces the fortunes of three unusual women and the men who love them from the summer of 1913 to the hurricane of 1938.

Elizabeth Gonne Low, 65 when the story begins, is a wealthy outsider in the coastal town of Westport, Massachusetts, though she lives there year-round. So does Maggie, a 16-year-old immigrant from Latin America who tends to Elizabeth, beds down with a local merchant, and seems to know everything about animals and plants. Elizabeth’s granddaughter Eve comes for the summers, beginning in 1917 when the seven-year-old arrives with her father, grief-stricken after his wife’s mysterious death. Eve found her mother’s body, and she’s retreated into a hazy disconnect that entices Jake Wilkes, a local boy who “grows displaced from his own life” through reading the books in Elizabeth’s library. Jake’s older brother, Wes, solidly rooted in the town’s old ways, becomes a rum-runner and engages in a fierce, disastrous affair with Maggie. Eve feels Jake’s attraction (“somehow he had unwrapped her, and now she could not find her way back to being closed”), but she settles for Patrick Gerow, an architect designing fancy new houses for the summer people. Elizabeth’s thoughts turn increasingly toward death, Maggie nurses the shattered Wes, and Eve yearns for Jake as the narrative meanders toward the famous hurricane that devastated New England on September 21, 1938. The storm blows some energy into Tripp’s languid narrative, though even in this apocalyptic climax the prose tends to be overwrought, as are the plot developments. Tripp writes lovely sentences, but she’s so enamored by the sound of her authorial voice that the characters remain artful constructs without convincing lives of their own.

Lots of nicely rendered, physically specific details about farming, fishing, and hunting in the first third of the 20th century, but too many of the central insights are as solemn and obvious as the moon imagery that gives the book its title.

Pub Date: July 15, 2003

ISBN: 0-375-50844-9

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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DISTANT SHORES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...

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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

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.