A redemption story, with some satisfying suspense and triumph, that delivers too much unbelievable tragedy for such a...
A talented young runner escapes a turbulent childhood only to face even bigger challenges in this debut novel.
With an abusive father, Wes Strong grows up living in a state of undeserved criticism and fear. A hardworking student who just wants to make his father proud, Wes asks earnestly in prayer “What have I done, God? What am I doing wrong?” Even though he never does anything wrong, his father’s abuse is merely the first, and least awful, of the horrors awaiting him. He briefly finds an outlet for frustration on the running team, even achieving a scholarship to a nearby university. But as he relishes escaping his father, his indulgence in his first and only beer quickly snowballs into a sudden pain pill addiction and a drug deal that ends with the murder of a policeman, landing Wes in prison for six years. To top it all off, his mother dies in a car wreck around the same time. Despite all this adversity, Wes carries on and tries to avoid the two leading rival gangs at his new home in prison: the “boys” and the “freaks.” But, poster boy for Murphy’s Law that he is, Wes soon becomes a target for rape by the “boys” and seeks refuge with their enemies, discovering that they truly are freaks: “Jesus Freaks.” Wes builds a relationship with God that seems to reverse his bad luck. In telling Wes’ tale, Smith makes it difficult for a reader to take the protagonist’s “redemption” seriously. Most of the characters are two-dimensional, either completely monstrous or saintly, and Wes’ wrong place, wrong time “crime” is much less intriguing than a true dark side. The author excels in small, contained scenes, especially Wes’ races, which are taut, suspenseful, and compulsively readable. But Smith never decides how best to approach Wes, sometimes narrating from his first-person perspective and sometimes describing him at a distance like a documentarian. The result is a disjointed character who never earns the sympathy he truly deserves.
A redemption story, with some satisfying suspense and triumph, that delivers too much unbelievable tragedy for such a fragmented central character.Pub Date: June 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5127-4282-4
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2016
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
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