But, still, this is an interesting debut, with some beautifully lyrical evocations of place and emotion.
A first novel of Brontëan intensity and Gothic nastiness from British writer Barker, who, in telling the story of an irrevocably doomed young woman, indicts Scottish life as well.
Janet, the eldest of five—born in her grandparents' comfortable manse near Edinburgh while father Hector is away at war—soon begins the cycle of hurts that will culminate in her murder at 16. After her beloved grandmother dies, Janet is soon and permanently supplanted in her mother's affections by a quick succession of more babies. Vera, the mother, "only really liked babies and found children annoying. In fact, she said it was possible for a mother to dislike her own child"—a fact that doesn't cheer Janet but does reconcile her somewhat to her mother's coldness. But a move to a remote ancestral castle, an austerely beautiful place where winter is five months long, merely isolates Janet further. Her only consolations are reading, learning Latin and Greek, nature, and the friendship of an aging and alcoholic cousin whom her mother detests and soon sends away. Residing in Caledonia, whose Calvinist nature is "pitiless," Janet, exquisitely sensitive to pain and suffering, is predestined to be unhappy. At home, she is ignored by her family; away at boarding school, a bleak and relentlessly anti-intellectual place, she survives by helping with homework and telling stories against herself; and a venture into local society is a disaster. School over, Janet returns home, where her family and their servants treat her with even greater insensitivity. Someone like poor Janet- -isolated, her only companion a bird she's rescued, and increasingly emotionally distraught—can have no happy ending: her rather abrupt murder is a welcome end to a life of unmitigated misery. The unceasing victimization of Janet can seem just too much, as the point is soon taken about narrow and pitiless Caledonia.
But, still, this is an interesting debut, with some beautifully lyrical evocations of place and emotion.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-15-167774-3
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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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