LIKE A WOMAN

Name: LIKE A WOMAN
Author: Debra Busman
ISBN: 978-1938103247

by Debra Busman ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2015

Finding the depth in a character’s struggle is the novelist’s task, and Busman does get there but somehow does not make her...

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A look at the scorched-earth terrain of a miserable childhood and hardscrabble life on the streets; there's a tough girl named Taylor at the center, coming of age in some of the hardest circumstances.

Busman’s beautifully written debut novel takes place in dirt-poor suburban Los Angeles, though the accents and idiom seem Southern at first, but that might be immaterial—poverty and moral chaos are the setting. The novel dips into episodes in Taylor's life, beginning when she's 7 and part of a tightknit group of children who band together to protect each other from their nightmarish, abusive parents; the deck is stacked against them, and near the beginning of the book, they mourn the loss of a crippled child who has suffered appalling parental abuse. Later, a young teenage Taylor takes to the streets, finding a girlfriend, Jackson, and a car interior to sleep in, which, after the horrors of her childhood home, seems like a refuge. She does drugs, steals compulsively, turns tricks, and tries to nurture her relationship with Jackson, a likable girl working on being a writer amid this rough life. Busman (California State/Humanities and Communication) has perfect pitch for the street slang her characters use and a nice rhythm in her prose, but the specter of kids fighting exploitative adults seems like familiar, even generic, territory. Taylor’s fierce attitude at times verges on corny, with nothing but loss and bad luck coming her way and love also proving a roller coaster (though Busman is at her most lyrical in conveying its sweet power, too). Near the end, a scene of Taylor battling a colt on a ranch gives a glimpse of what Busman is capable of—the novel rears to life, with Taylor for once using her strength against something that isn’t mysteriously set against her, but naturally so. A late episode involving a near drowning also has staggering power, again allowing something elemental to blow open the novel’s focus, which is occasionally too narrow.

Finding the depth in a character’s struggle is the novelist’s task, and Busman does get there but somehow does not make her protagonist specific enough until the very end.

Pub Date: March 17, 2015

ISBN: 978-1938103247

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Dzanc

Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015

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.

Pub Date: June 1, 1985

ISBN: 068487122X

Page Count: 872

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

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THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

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ONE DAY IN DECEMBER

by Josie Silver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 16, 2018

Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an...

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True love flares between two people, but they find that circumstances always impede it.

On a winter day in London, Laurie spots Jack from her bus home and he sparks a feeling in her so deep that she spends the next year searching for him. Her roommate and best friend, Sarah, is the perfect wing-woman but ultimately—and unknowingly—ends the search by finding Jack and falling for him herself. Laurie’s hasty decision not to tell Sarah is the second painful missed opportunity (after not getting off the bus), but Sarah’s happiness is so important to Laurie that she dedicates ample energy into retraining her heart not to love Jack. Laurie is misguided, but her effort and loyalty spring from a true heart, and she considers her project mostly successful. Perhaps she would have total success, but the fact of the matter is that Jack feels the same deep connection to Laurie. His reasons for not acting on them are less admirable: He likes Sarah and she’s the total package; why would he give that up just because every time he and Laurie have enough time together (and just enough alcohol) they nearly fall into each other’s arms? Laurie finally begins to move on, creating a mostly satisfying life for herself, whereas Jack’s inability to be genuine tortures him and turns him into an ever bigger jerk. Patriarchy—it hurts men, too! There’s no question where the book is going, but the pacing is just right, the tone warm, and the characters sympathetic, even when making dumb decisions.

Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an emotional, satisfying read.