CAPE BRETON ROAD

Name: CAPE BRETON ROAD
Author: D.R. MacDonald
ISBN: 0-15-100523-0

by D.R. MacDonald ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2001

Despite many striking moments and incidental virtues, this feels both underimagined and underdeveloped: the work of a...

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The harsh beauty of Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island forms the backdrop for this vivid if somewhat diffuse chronicle of rootlessness and sexual rivalry, the first novel from the author of the critically praised story collection Eyestone (1988).

Nineteen-year-old Innis Corbett was born in Cape Breton but raised in the States (Watertown, Massachusetts, near Boston), where his father’s accidental death and his mother’s promiscuity and neglect of him have left Innis on his own to find trouble—in the form of repeated car thefts, for which he’s been deported and is spending a year living with his uncle Starr, a quick-tempered TV repairman. Back in “his” country, Innis is caught cutting down a tree on a neighbor’s property, where he furtively grows the marijuana cash crop he hopes will purchase his freedom from Starr, with whom he maintains a tense détente that’s pushed past the breaking point when the 40-ish woman his uncle brings home, former “air hostess” Claire Watson, arouses Innis’s frustrated sexuality, propelling him to further acts of theft and violence. This is a thickly detailed, convincingly claustrophobic narrative, enlivened by precise, ominous descriptions of the Corbetts’ wintry environment (“The storms had driven in a huge tree trunk, its amputated roots already sea-worn, topped with claws of ice,” etc.) and dramatically effective crisp, pungent dialogue. But it’s so rigorously downbeat that it’s hard to identify with any of MacDonald’s tightly wound principal characters. Furthermore, the heavy burden of background action (which seems to have been crucially formative for Innis) is doled out in arbitrary brief flashbacks lacking in either cumulative force or variety. One wonders if Innis was conceived as another Aeneas, a wanderer without a country, mourning his dead father—but if so, the comparisons aren’t fully explored.

Despite many striking moments and incidental virtues, this feels both underimagined and underdeveloped: the work of a first-rate storyteller who isn’t yet a novelist.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-15-100523-0

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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MAGIC HOUR

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

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Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.

Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

Pub Date: March 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-345-46752-3

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.