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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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