Appealing characters and humor help balance the farfetched New Age hokum.
Single Oklahoma mom with psychic abilities journeys to Santa Fe in this sequel to The Saints and Sinners of Okay County (2004).
Though she’s spent much of her life denying her gift, Aletta Honor is dismayed in 1977 to find her powers failing just when she needs them most. With four kids to feed and little help from hard-drinking ex-husband Jimmy, she has no means of supporting her family except by giving psychic readings. But Aletta’s visions vanish shortly after an Indian man from New Mexico and his daughter drive up to her house and present her with an eagle feather. Around the same time, her long-lost cousin Vee arrives in town for an unexpected visit and offers the surprising information that their great-grandmother Adelaide was a full-blooded Indian. Inspired to learn more about this ancestor and to track down the man who gave her the feather, Aletta piles into her Gran Torino and sets out with three girlfriends for a Santa Fe adventure, leaving Vee with the kids. Her mystery man turns out to be Julian Mochino, part-time shaman, part-time tour guide and full-time schoolteacher. Aletta immediately bonds with the attractive widower, who introduces her to some tribal elders. They convince her to go on a solo quest to learn more about Adelaide’s fate. At this point, Dunbar’s story meanders into murky metaphysical territory, with spirit guides and visions slowing the plot’s momentum. Her challenging personal test gives Aletta a renewed sense of purpose and faith in her abilities. Back home, unlikely babysitter Vee has some revelations about her troubled past, even as it catches up with her. Meanwhile, Jimmy finally decides to get some help for his drinking problem. His harrowing experience with Alcoholics Anonymous spurs him toward performing an unselfish act for his children, paving the way for a new, improved Jimmy in the next installment in the Okay County series.
Appealing characters and humor help balance the farfetched New Age hokum.Pub Date: March 28, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46043-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping...
When the newly elected Vice President’s life is threatened, the Secret Service runs to nomadic soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher (Echo Burning, 2001, etc.) in this razor-sharp update of The Day of the Jackal and In the Line of Fire that’s begging to be filmed.
Why Reacher? Because M.E. Froelich, head of the VP’s protection team, was once a colleague and lover of his late brother Joe, who’d impressed her with tales of Jack’s derring-do as an Army MP. Now Froelich and her Brooks Brothers–tailored boss Stuyvesant have been receiving a series of anonymous messages threatening the life of North Dakota Senator/Vice President–elect Brook Armstrong. Since the threats may be coming from within the Secret Service’s own ranks—if they aren’t, it’s hard to see how they’ve been getting delivered—they can’t afford an internal investigation. Hence the call to Reacher, who wastes no time in hooking up with his old friend Frances Neagley, another Army vet turned private eye, first to see whether he can figure out a way to assassinate Armstrong, then to head off whoever else is trying. It’s Reacher’s matter-of-fact gift to think of everything, from the most likely position a sniper would assume at Armstrong’s Thanksgiving visit to a homeless shelter to the telltale punctuation of one of the threats, and to pluck helpers from the tiny cast who can fill the remaining gaps because they aren’t idiots or stooges. And it’s Child’s gift to keep tightening the screws, even when nothing’s happening except the arrival of a series of unsigned letters, and to convey a sense of the blank impossibility of guarding any public figure from danger day after highly exposed day, and the dedication and heroism of the agents who take on this daunting job.
Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping himself these days.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14861-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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