This thought-provoking tale makes a strong argument for letting go of past pain.
A novel examines the impact of a father’s suicide on his son.
Jimmy Lansford had a hard childhood in rural Oklahoma, but he seems to have come out well. He has a well-paying job and he and his wife, Jill, and their children, Jonathan and Jessica, live in an upper-class neighborhood near Phoenix. Yet Jimmy is a haunted man, scarred by his past. His father, Ronnie, killed himself when Jimmy was 15 years old and his sister, Kelly, was 12. They were left living with their meth addict mother until Jimmy escaped to college. It’s slowly revealed that Kelly wasn’t as lucky. Strange things start to happen to Jimmy when Jessica is about to turn 12. First, on a business trip, he spies someone in his room through a window, but there’s no trace of anyone there when he races back. Then, at Jessica’s birthday party, he senses a presence with him in his bathroom. Jimmy reaches his breaking point when he finds muddy, inexplicable footprints in his bedroom. This leads the former cross-country star to sneak out his bedroom window and nearly run himself to death, ending up hospitalized with dehydration. Jimmy thinks he’s possessed. Those around him want to chalk up his behavior to survivor’s guilt. The truth lies somewhere in between. McKissen (The Civil War at Home, 2018) paints a well-conceived portrait of a troubled man, utilizing Jimmy’s journey through life. The author cleverly alternates between the present and Jimmy’s formative years, slowly unreeling the protagonist’s past so that readers can understand why such a good man is struggling despite his circumstances. Kelly hangs over the entire tale, as Jimmy blames himself for her tragic fate, thinking his departure ultimately doomed her. His intriguing backstory is a tale of missed opportunities. Things would have been different if Jimmy had been willing to reach out more fervently to Mike Carlisle, the cop who had taken an interest in the Lansford siblings after Ronnie’s suicide. The effective ending involves Jimmy's informing his family about the hurt he’s carried all these years.
This thought-provoking tale makes a strong argument for letting go of past pain.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68433-364-6
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Short, to the point, and absolutely unremarkable: sure to be another medium-hot romance-lite hit for Sparks, who at the very...
A mother unburdens a story of past romance to her troubled daughter for no good reason.
Adrienne Willis is a middle-aged mother with three kids who, not surprisingly, finds herself in an emotional lurch after her husband dumps her for a younger, prettier thing. Needing to recharge her batteries, Adrienne takes a holiday, watching over her friend’s small bed-and-breakfast in the North Carolina beach town of Rodanthe. Then Dr. Paul Flanner appears, himself a cold fish in need of a little warming up. This is the scene laid out by Adrienne to her daughter, Amanda, in a framing device of unusual crudity from Sparks (A Bend in the Road, 2001, etc.). Amanda’s husband has recently died and she hasn’t quite gotten around to figuring out how to keep on living. Imagining that nothing is better for a broken heart than somebody else’s sad story, Adrienne tells her daughter about the great lost love of her life. Paul came to Rodanthe in order to speak with the bereaved family of a woman who had just died after he had operated on her. Paul, of course, was not to blame, but still he suffers inside. Add to that a recent divorce and an estranged child and the result is a tortured soul whom Adrienne finds absolutely irresistible. Of course, the beach, an impending storm, the fact that there are no other visitors around, a roaring fireplace, and any number of moments that could have been culled from a J. Crew catalogue and a Folgers’s commercial make romance just about inevitable. Sparks couldn’t be less subtle in this harshly mechanical story that adheres to formula in a way that would make an assembly-line romance writer blush.
Short, to the point, and absolutely unremarkable: sure to be another medium-hot romance-lite hit for Sparks, who at the very least can never be accused of overstaying his welcome.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2002
ISBN: 0-446-53133-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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