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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CARRIE

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 1974

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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.