Too many voices fragment the main story arc of this complex and insightful rendering of contemporary love and family.
A novel explores relationships, romance, and autism spectrum disorders.
On the first day of school at San Francisco’s George Takei High, sophomore Jack Kagen, diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, and his almost 40-year-old divorced mom, Anna, both meet their future loves. Despite Jack’s communication difficulties, he pursues his classmate Ashleigh Allen, who takes him on as a well-intentioned project. Anna has her hands full; as she puts it, “I had a job, two kids, no husband.” While strongly attracted to Jason Armstrong, a police officer, she must also defend herself against ex-husband and District Attorney Alex’s barbed comments and plots to ensure the success of their 5-year-old precocious daughter, Marissa. Jason finds his way into Anna’s heart but so does his teenage son, Trevor, who is also on the autism spectrum. They seem destined to become a family until ex-spouses cause trouble and Anna fears her children won’t be safe unless Jason and Trevor leave their lives. Meanwhile, Jack discovers Ashleigh’s secret and calls on all his abilities and courage to pursue her before she departs. Levin’s (There’s More Than One Way Home, 2017, etc.) tale employs multiple points of view: Jack’s, Anna’s, Ashleigh’s, and Marissa’s. Only Anna’s is first person, guiding the reader to align most closely with her. Her sections have the sexy, romantic vibe that will likely appeal to adult readers: “His shirt was tight across his broad chest,” she notes during her first encounter with Jason. Later, during a time apart, she laments: “I ached to feel the cotton of his uniform sleeves sliding against my skin.” Jack’s teenage point of view is striking for the glimpse it provides into Asperger’s. Words elude Jack, but he persists: “ ‘It’s something like…something like….’ The words were dangling up high in his brain.” Ashleigh’s and Marissa’s points of view are intriguing but divert readers from Anna’s and Jack’s compelling sections.
Too many voices fragment the main story arc of this complex and insightful rendering of contemporary love and family.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9997569-3-5
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Chickadee Prince Books
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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