An appealing story about love between a recovering anorexic and a deaf would-be pastor barely survives veteran novelist Betts's (Souls Raised From the Dead, 1994, etc.) awkward flirtation with significance as she introduces a ghost and the battle at Waco. Luna Stone and Steve Grier leave North Carolina in April 1993 for California, where Steve has been offered a teaching job. The two plan to marry along the way. But as the journey begins, Luna, an artist who had been hospitalized in college for depression and anorexia, begins to have second thoughts. She has been supporting the two of them by doing medical illustrations while Steve finishes his dissertation, but she's beginning to realize that Steve is stingy and selfish. She's also obsessed with the FBI's attack on Koresh's compound and the consequent conflagration. And so Luna leaves Steve in Reno, takes her van, and heads to the nearby mountains to camp and think. An Army brat whose life has been regimented by a domineering father, she's also a lapsed Catholic who can't quite forget her religion. During the day she hikes trails and thinks about her life; at night she's visited both by a ghost and by a starving young boy. The ghost is Tamsen Donner, a member of the infamous Donner Party, whose survivors made it through the winter by eating the dead. The young boy, whom Luna befriends, is Sam, who'd been sold to—and has escaped from—a child-porn ring. When Sam and Luna move on to another camp, they meet Paul, whose plans to be a Lutheran minister have been disrupted by an accident that has left him deaf. A day-trip to Reno goes terribly wrong when Sam is kidnapped, but Luna and Paul eventually rescue him. Their love acknowledged, they are free to move forward, with Sam in tow. A pair of twentysomething lovers refreshingly reach out beyond themselves to act like grown-ups in a novel that succeeds in spite of itself.
Pub Date: May 9, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-45072-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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