This inventive debut doesn’t imitate the traditional British academic comedy but, rather, forges an identity all its own.
A 26-year-old virgin with a high IQ and low self-esteem learns that most of life’s lessons are taught outside academe’s ivied walls.
At the start of the fall term, Gillian Cormier-Brandenburg, a fourth-year doctoral student at Harvard’s Divinity School, receives word that her funding is about to be cut. The Zephyr Committee, which has paid for her schooling the past three years, believes her thesis proposal lacks academic rigor. For her dissertation, Gillian wants to interview individuals who have had secular conversions: moments of reason, clarity or nondenominational spirituality that have changed their lives. She just hasn’t found any yet. Her somewhat sympathetic adviser gives her three months to prove the committee wrong and suggests she visit a local halfway house for women, where she might find potential interviewees. Gillian follows his advice and in short order, the overworked executive director of Responsibility House has hired Gillian to be the night manager, which presents a steep (near-vertical) learning curve for Gillian, this being her first job—ever. The residents, all recovering alcoholics or drug addicts on parole, find it difficult to relate to the exceedingly short (Gillian has to stand on a chair to get anyone’s attention), often hyperventilating polymath in their midst. As her efforts to reform her charges—vocabulary games during dinner hour; group discussions on ethics—are subjected to withering sarcasm or complete disregard, Gillian finds herself also making no progress on her dissertation. And the uncomfortable fact of her virginity begins to interfere with her concentration the more time she spends among her worldly charges. Only when a handsome ex-con enters her life does Gillian begin to understand what part of herself a “secular conversion” might reveal. Brink has crafted an original heroine in Gillian, a half-pint, over-educated neurotic who finds the courage to let her heart override her overworked brain.
This inventive debut doesn’t imitate the traditional British academic comedy but, rather, forges an identity all its own.Pub Date: June 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-65114-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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