Giffin’s moving storyline offers great pacing, believable, disparate characters and a plot that could easily careen into...
Kirby Rose turns 18, hops on a Greyhound bus from St. Louis to Manhattan and with no warning, knocks on the Fifth Avenue apartment door of her birth mother, Marian Caldwell—a move that will send them both on a journey of rediscovery, questioning everything they thought they knew about love, family, secrets and second chances.
Kirby is a classic underachiever in a family who values things she scorns and is mystified by the things she loves. Adopted when she was days old to a couple who’d concluded they’d never have kids, she’s grown up on the story, as much a part of the family history as the surprise of her sister’s “real” birth 11 months later. It’s only when she gets to high school that she feels disconnected to her adoptive family, and by the time she’s a senior, there’s a frustration on all sides that Kirby has failed in some way. Not clear on her own motivations, Kirby sets out to find her birth mother, landing unannounced on Marian’s Manhattan penthouse doorstep. Connecting with her daughter knocks Marian off her content, polished life path—and forces her to question the choices she’s made, the secrets she’s kept, the people she loves and the ones she’s left behind. Ultimately, Kirby and Marian will set off together to find the one person they both need to put all the pieces together, offering Kirby the confidence to embrace who she really is and Marian the opportunity to right some long-standing transgressions. Along the way, both women will revisit questions of family, identity, secrets and love—and what it truly means to belong. Giffin delivers an emotionally poignant and reflective look at teen pregnancy through a rearview mirror and how 18 years later, one woman’s hindsight is sometimes too easy, and sometimes too hard, on her adolescent self. And yet, on a certain level, as all parties come to understand, it doesn’t exactly matter. What really matters is how one chooses to live today—to express love, to live authentically and to embrace life itself, even when it lands on your doorstep in unexpected ways when you’re least prepared for it.
Giffin’s moving storyline offers great pacing, believable, disparate characters and a plot that could easily careen into maudlin territory, unlikable stereotypes or over-the-top emotionalism but never does: a sweet, even-keeled winner.Pub Date: July 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-55419-4
Page Count: 383
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2012
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.
