by Elmer Kelton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2005
Easygoing days in the saddle, related in a drawl that’s sweet as pure honey. One has to appreciate a Western whose hero is...
One of the last cowboys still riding through American fiction moseys through Texas, and gets into trouble.
Having detailed the latter-day escapades of Texas cowpuncher Hewey Calloway in previous novels (The Smiling Country, 1998, etc.), Kelton now heads back to 1889 for a look at Hewey and his brother Walter in their younger days. The two are wandering the vast West Texas landscape when they fall in with a couple of cowboys who turn out to be rustlers. Never that smart, Hewey informs on the rustlers, earning their enmity. But there’s little time to worry about that, as the Calloway brothers find themselves working hard for skinflint rancher C.C. Tarpley, earning just six bits a day (that’s 75 cents to city folk). This arrangement is just fine by Hewey, who wants nothing more than a good horse, some grub and nobody bossing him around. But Walter has fallen in love with a girl from the nearby town. The entanglement is more than a little irksome to Hewey, who barely hesitates before signing his brother and himself up for a long ride down to San Antonio to bring back a herd of cattle that C.C. just bought—anything to get out in the open country and keep Walter away from the girl. It’s a nice lengthy ride, with more than a few mishaps along the way, but nothing that Hewey and dumb luck can’t handle.
Easygoing days in the saddle, related in a drawl that’s sweet as pure honey. One has to appreciate a Western whose hero is so bad with a revolver that he couldn’t hit water if he was standing knee deep in a lake.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-765-30956-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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by Elmer Kelton
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by Elmer Kelton
by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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