Prose's satirical eye focuses on what should have been an excellent targeta cult of goddess-worshippers intent on healing a lovelorn female's heartbut she fails to hit home with the gleeful vigor so evident in Primitive People (1992) and Bigfoot Dreams (1986). Having just turned 30, crushed to find that she's still just an underpaid fact-checker at a New York fashion magazine, and recovering from yet another destructive love affair at that, Martha is spending a solitary weekend at Fire Island when she stumbles across a wacky-looking, all-female druid ceremony taking place on the beach. Noticing that the group's leader is drowning in the chilly waves, Martha spontaneously saves her lifeand is thus sucked into the maelstrom of a fervent goddess-worshipping cult peopled with pseudo-academic oddballs named Hegwitha, Titania, Freya, Isis Moonwagon, and so on. Clearly, the situation has comic potential, and the cast of female fanatics has been provocatively assembled. But Prose can find little for them to do following this encounter. Though Martha tags dutifully along, helping celebrate the solstice, spouting mangled revisionist feminist history and female-centric jargon, and participating in some routine backstabbing and weepy late-night confession fests, the goddess- worshippers' antics never amount to much more than an occasional silly line or ho-hum revelation. Meanwhile, Martha's character remains paper-thin, and the worshippers themselves never move beyond sketchy caricature, as they travel to Arizona for a doomed encounter with Native American healer Maria Aquilo (``Maria does vision quest. She does sweat lodge. She does dream work and Talking Stick and drumming and spirit dance intensive''). In the end, Prose solves her heroine's problems by sending an eligible male down the desert road to rescue heran anticlimax for the reader as much as for Martha's loony friends. An execution as inexplicably lifeless as its heroineand a disappointment from this highly gifted author.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-17371-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
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
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