A touching coming-of-age story about a boy who has to deal with more troubles than any kid should.
A 12-year-old boy experiences the magic of first love while coping with serious family problems in this debut novel.
Joey Norton is growing up in San Diego in 1962, the height of the Leave It to Beaver era, but his home life includes its share of unconventional elements. His mother parades around the house nude, sometimes getting a little too close to Joey, which infuriates his sister. For his part, Joey sneaks out of the house at night to spy on a neighborhood girl through her bedroom window. He gets beaten up by her brother over the voyeurism, but that fails to deter him from playing at being a peeping Tom on a semiregular basis. The Nortons aren’t stereotypical free-spirited Southern Californians, though, but Southern Baptists, originally from Texas. On a trip to Texas to visit his grandmother, Joey meets Gloria, a second cousin, and their new relationship leaves him feeling pangs of desire and intense emotion: “It was too much goodness and beauty and stimulation and joy and the fulfillment of every dream of what having a girlfriend might mean.” Returning home, Joey pitches for the Little League baseball team, fends off his busybody mother and needling sister, and lives to secretly call Gloria at night. His dad, a bastion of stability and provider of advice, doesn’t have a great relationship with his wife, and an unexplained emergency that he rushes out to one night ends up being a fateful evening in devastating ways. Told from an adult perspective, the voice that Galyean gives Joey is at once romantic, nostalgic, self-effacing, and angry. The fairly adult subject matter is at times frank and disturbing, but the world the author creates for Joey is always rich with emotion and detail. From the stunningly confident older sister, Debbie, to the slamming front door at the grandmother’s house, the people and places are instantly familiar and exist in a complex, difficult world full of pain, insight, and beauty. The novel is somewhat overwritten; a slimmer version would have strengthened the work without undermining its many intricacies.
A touching coming-of-age story about a boy who has to deal with more troubles than any kid should.Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4935-1119-8
Page Count: 466
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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