A hypnotic tale of family secrets that also features delightfully silly humor.
Two troubled lives intersect in a novel combining cozy mystery, comedy, and reflections on fractured relationships.
Mark is a 30-something financial planner from Chicago who inherits his long-lost aunt’s house in Michigan’s rural Upper Peninsula, near Canada. He’s extremely phobic about driving on bridges, so he can only reach his late Aunt Vivian’s home in tiny Manistique by closing his eyes and letting a volunteer driver take him across the roughly 5-mile Mackinac Bridge. Emily, a 24-year-old medical school graduate, is traumatized after hitting a deer with her car while lost in thought about an adulterous affair and a mistake that caused a patient’s death. Stranded in Manistique while awaiting windshield repairs, she seeks shelter at Vivian’s house, which is also be a bed-and-breakfast. Mark, the only person there, is caught off guard, but he tries to accommodate her. He soon becomes, in his own words, “the worst innkeeper imaginable.” Cuesta creates an eccentric cast of townies and further houseguests, including a narcoleptic tourist who’s attempting to be the first person to ever drive around Lake Michigan in an electric car. Along the way, he use his characters’ foibles to deliver Fawlty Towers-style farce, as when Mark ineptly tries to hide the demise of an elderly houseguest. But there’s a sober side to the novel, as well, such as when Vivian’s handyman, Bear Foot, starts a fire in the backyard to help Vivian’s “thundering spirit” journey to the next world. Mark only met his aunt once, as a young child, and he knows little about her except that she was adopted, worked as an international aid doctor in war zones, and figured in his memory like a “saint”; he marvels when Bear Foot talks about her Native American heritage. Cuesta ping-pongs between Mark’s and Emily’s stories before smoothly bringing them together as more houseguests arrive and the young doctor discovers a book containing one of Vivian’s essays. Throughout the novel, the author’s descriptions of Upper Peninsula settings are simple yet evocative, as when Mark releases Vivian’s ashes into a lake and they form “a mesmerizing cloud beneath the surface.”
A hypnotic tale of family secrets that also features delightfully silly humor.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73241-090-9
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Celestial Eyes Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
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
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