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ACHILLES

Name: ACHILLES
Author: Elizabeth Cook
ISBN: 0-312-28884-0

by Elizabeth Cook ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2001

A mix.

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British writer and scholar Cook offers up an inconsistently satisfying curiosity in this little slip of a debut novel retelling the story of Achilles’ life.

At times the author catches an effect that’s just right—that vivifies, that is, or expands in new words the reader’s impression-memories of the classics themselves, mainly the Homeric epics. What it’s like for Achilles in the Afterworld, for example (this just before the still-living Odysseus visits him): “You know the living are up there, driving your horses, ploughing your fields, handling your bowls. Eating. The living are always eating; their tongues fossicking among the bones”). Less satisfying, though, is her unimaginative decision to adhere to a narrative view of the gods as “magic” beings, as in the story of Achilles’ birth, when Thetis dips him in the Styx (“‘Immortality,’ she said, ‘I’m burning away [his] mortal parts in the fire of this river’”). One craves not such schoolroom retellings but descriptions instead of real people and of the actual human traits that gave rise to the myths. And yet, when she does try doing it this way, Cook often limps and loses her ear, as in her implying of Helen’s beauty by berating the craven beastliness of the men who lust for her (“their cheers were in Paris’ ears as he fucked her. He needed others to want her to want her”). Achilles’ youthful sexual joining with Deidamia is more successfully told, as is his deadly encounter with Penthiseleia, the Amazon queen. Possibly most captivating is the chapter on Chiron, the wise centaur. The closing section—about Keats’s aesthetic-emotional relatedness to antiquity—is quite beautifully done, though it remains more envoi than part of the whole—and even here one’s sense of being in capable poetic hands is shaken by Cook’s curious way elsewhere in the book of resorting to absurdly blunt effects like “AAAAAIIIIIIIEEEEEE!!!” or “QUICK! / CLOSE THE GATE. ACHILLES IS COMING.”

A mix.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-312-28884-0

Page Count: 128

Publisher: Picador

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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.