Noble conforms to the conventions of contemporary women’s lit—the struggle to balance friends, career, romance and...
A bittersweet romance between two lonely 40-year-olds who were once teenage lovers.
For nine years, Susannah has lived an undemanding life with Douglas in London, but it’s missing a lot: passion, commitment, children and, Susannah is beginning to think, love. At her brother’s quaint village wedding, Susannah bumps into Rob, her teenage boyfriend, the man not even her first husband could compare to. After pleasantries they part, but memories of their relationship begin to haunt Susannah, and they exist in stark contrast to the everyday tedium she shares with Douglas. Worse than the domestic humdrum is that his three children are often in her care, but Douglas has made it clear that she is neither their mother nor friend, which leaves her as little more than housekeeper when they visit. Susannah is isolated in their home and so retreats to recollections of her youth and those almost forgotten dreams of true love and a houseful of children. She and Rob experienced the kind of teenage passion that is familiar but seems extraordinary, that perfect expression of love, blossoming sexuality and boundless hope. As she relives her first love, the other constant of her youth, best friend Amelia, is struck with cancer. It seems nothing is right, and then the unexpected changes Susannah’s life—Rob calls and asks to meet. Retired from the RAF and now living in London (his new wife Helena is stationed in Afghanistan), Rob and Susannah begin meeting casually to reminisce, seeking out quiet corners of museums to talk, but soon enough they are in love again. What to do? Do they deserve happiness more than Douglas and Helena? Are they meant to be? Love is finally tested when Helena returns from the war injured.
Noble conforms to the conventions of contemporary women’s lit—the struggle to balance friends, career, romance and babies—yet still delivers a poignant romance in which the ideals of young love confront the grimmer realities of an adult world.Pub Date: March 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5485-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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