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SUMMER’S HOUSE

Name: SUMMER’S HOUSE
Author: Eric Gabriel Lehman
ISBN: 0-312-24112-7

by Eric Gabriel Lehman ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 8, 2000

A richly detailed, if sometimes too busy, tale of what can happen when the thermometer rises and action intensifies.

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Three men scarred by family and failure find their lives unexpectedly intersecting as they survive a Manhattan summer: a time in the 1970s that’s more a steamy dreamscape inhabited by the lost, lonely, and confused than a crisp-edged slice of reality.

Lehman’s (Quaspeck, 1993, etc.) three narrators relate their experiences of the summer that will become a defining moment in their lives. Raymond, the youngest, uncertain of his sexual identity, longs to fall in love. He begins his story shortly before graduating from high school, when his parents have just separated: his father was having an affair, and, never close to his father, Raymond blames him rather than his quirky, self-absorbed mother. Then there’s 25-year-old Jerome, a poet, who was hospitalized by his sister and brother-in law for deliberately setting a fire in their house. At the institution he meets Agatha, an elusive, disturbed young woman with whom he later lives—until she throws him out upon learning that he’s been keeping a record of her secrets. Last comes middle-aged former boy wonder Lester, Raymond’s uncle and Jerome’s current employer. Lester’s business is failing, his son Stevie is mentally retarded, and his wife is having their yard expensively landscaped. As Raymond draws closer to his father after his mother goes to Israel, he meets Agatha, reads Jerome’s journals (which she’s kept), and falls for an older gay man. Jerome, meanwhile, moves in with performance artist Dwight, who has enlisted the homeless to build a tower of trash in the empty building where they’re living illegally. Lester, who treats Jerome as his confidante, declares bankruptcy, but—as Dwight’s planned spectacle, complete with poetry readings and music by friends of Raymond’s, goes tragically awry—the lives of all converge in surprising and redemptive ways.

A richly detailed, if sometimes too busy, tale of what can happen when the thermometer rises and action intensifies.

Pub Date: June 8, 2000

ISBN: 0-312-24112-7

Page Count: 288

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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.