A stellar collection.
A rich and complex vision of the American South emerges from the series’ 22nd edition.
There’s room here for traditional southern tales—those that “entertain on the way to their point,” in Jones’s words. The best include Tim Gautreaux’s “The Safe,” about a junkman whose life is changed when he opens a long-abandoned safe; Allan Gurganus’s “Fourteen Feet of Water in My House,” about a man who motorboats above his flooded neighborhood rescuing friends, strangers and pets after Hurricane Floyd; and R.T. Smith’s “Story,” in which a burglary rekindles a man’s passion for his wife. Other stories extend the boundaries of what is considered “the South.” Rick Bass’s powerful coming-of-age story, “Goats,” about two high-school boys who dream of starting a cattle ranch—in one scene they try to bring a calf home in a family station wagon—takes place outside Houston, Texas. In newcomer-to-watch Toni Jensen’s story, “At the Powwow Hotel,” a Native-American widower and his son spend two days in a cornfield that inexplicably appears next to their West Texas home. Another up-and-coming writer, Stephanie Powell Watts, writes about two Jehovah’s Witnesses who travel dirt roads in North Carolina looking for converts among the poor, white and wary (“Unassigned Territory”). Violence is decidedly part of the South envisioned here. In Agustín Maes’s chilling “Beauty and Virtue,” a serial killer drops in on his brother’s family; in Philipp Meyer’s “One Day This Will All Be Yours,” a son tries to prevent his father’s suicide while impassive neighbors look on. Angela Threatt’s teenage narrator in “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” faces all manner of urban threat when she and her mother move from the country to the projects in Richmond. Dogs roam throughout most of the stories, most memorably in Stephen Marion’s “Dogs with Human Faces,” about a resurrection of sorts.
A stellar collection.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-56512-556-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
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.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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