A man and a woman fall for each other, but this is a love story with a difference: the woman happens to be a werewolf. (David Garnett's Lady Into Fox is this first novel's next-of- kin.) Alice White was 13 when she first turned into a wolf, on her family's Virginia farm: ``It was the most joyous event of her young life.'' Since then, every full moon, she has become a wolf, turning human again by dawn. Now Alice is 32, and the playful wolf in the woods is a distant memory. After a grisly episode in which her wolf-self killed a farmhand about to rape her, Alice kept human contact to a minimum. She moved to Richmond, locking herself in the basement at full moons; instead of a boyfriend, she has had a series of one-night stands. Then two things happen: she sees a psychiatrist, and though Dr. Adams does not believe her ``delusions,'' he shows her how she can, through self- hypnosis, summon or banish the wolf at will. Second, Alice and her university adviser, wildlife biologist Erik Summers, fall in love. Making love to Erik, she rediscovers the freedom of the woods; she tells him her story. Fearful and unconvinced, Eric betrays Alice by turning to his manipulative ex-wife Debra; in a jealous fury, Alice forces Debra to witness a woman-to-wolf transformation, then flees to a Canadian wolf sanctuary, pursued by a remorseful Erik. Though Alice might be a National Enquirer item, Danvers's whole idea is to embed her in an ordinary world of messy relationships. Ironically, while he succeeds absolutely with the extraordinary (the images of Alice's transformations are stunningly right), he flounders elsewhere, diluting the intensity of Alice and Erik's love affair through the use of four different viewpoints and gratuitous excursions into the shrink's private life. Still, the novel is just bold and piquant enough to give it a shot at the best-seller lists.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-72827-X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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