The self-destructive family and the complicated love between siblings, core elements of McFarland's acclaimed 1990 debut The Music Room, reappear in a bold new configuration in this second novel about an elderly, emotionally unfulfilled brother and sister. News photographer and world traveler Francis Brimm has retired to his hometown of Pines, Florida; living nearby in the family home, her lifelong residence, is his older sister, 78-year-old Muriel. Their tranquillity is shattered when Francis discovers the remains of two murder victims, female college students; both Brimms receive threatening phone calls. But if the present is treacherous, so is the past. Her brother's return has revived Muriel's memories of an often grim childhood dominated by their father, an embittered doctor, a drunk, and a suicide. Muriel's defense has been religious belief, her brother's a skeptical detachment; neither has ever fully trusted others; ladies' man Francis has always shied away from commitments. McFarland's depiction of these old people navigating between visions, fantasy, and reality, fearful of appearing senile, glows with truthfulness. His handling of their fates is more problematic. A leisurely narrator, he suddenly, disconcertingly, becomes all business. Muriel, devastated by a childhood memory, succumbs to a fever, while Francis contracts a fatal blood disease; both are cocooned in fever-dreams. Their eleventh-hour savior is Deidre, young, unmarried, pregnant, and on the edge, Muriel's part-time help turned live-in housekeeper. Before Francis dies, all three savor the first-time experience of secure family love, of being thrillingly in touch, an apt sensation for the ``blind.'' It's a moving, dramatic conjunction, even if pushed a little too hard. Seldom has the combination in old people of spiritual authority, physical frailty, and sheer dottiness been caught with more acuity. McFarland's novel is full of airy meditations on mortality, but it is his robust characterizations that make it so heart-warming, such an impressive conquest of new territory. (Book- of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-395-64497-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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