A shocking tale of surviving abuse and living with its consequences.
Sowden’s debut novel follows a woman who’s haunted by the traumatic experiences of her teen years.
Grace is an accomplished chef living in Minneapolis. When she starts getting coverage on popular blogs, she panics at the thought of being interviewed, as she’d have to talk about herself and her difficult past. She already chain-smokes and practices jujitsu to help her cope with the horrific memories of her teens, many years ago. Her overbearing and difficult mother had arranged for her to be abducted by operatives of Epiphany Lake Academy, an expensive school for troubled high schoolers. Grace recalls the awful months in which she needed permission to stand, sit, speak, or do nearly anything else. At the academy, reading nonauthorized books, looking out the window for too long, and not properly confessing to past behavior were all punishable offenses that could earn violators time in “The Shed” with the school’s vile director, Crandall. Grace tried her best to deal with the disturbing therapy sessions and deplorable living conditions, but she soon learned that the school administrator had no reason to ever let her leave—and that all roads led to a mysterious second camp in the Dominican Republic called Mystic Bay, where some teens were sent to live in cages and endure further torture. Sowden excels at showing the long-lasting ramifications of these events on Grace as she alternates between past and present timelines; Sowden clearly shows how every aspect of the protagonist’s adult personality, from her interactions with co-workers to her reluctance to form friendships, has been altered by the horrible treatment she endured. The abuse itself is horrifying, and the author drives home the feelings of desperation and injustice; at several moments, it seems as if Grace has outsmarted the system only to end up in a worse position. Readers may be left with more questions than answers about Grace’s unstable mother, but the story still leads to satisfying and bittersweet conclusions about confronting one’s past.
A shocking tale of surviving abuse and living with its consequences.Pub Date: April 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-947041-53-0
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Running Wild Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
