Like the Forsytes saga, worth continuing for four or five more volumes.
The author of the remarkably fine The Laments (2004) returns with another deceptively modest but deeply satisfying story of an intelligent and prickly family and the difficulty of love.
Tom Bedlam was born in the age of Dickens and survived well into the age of Galsworthy, and there are nods to both those greats in this tale of a bright lad in dreadful circumstances. Living with his very odd mother, who adheres to Christian principles despite mean surroundings, Tom faces a bleak future. Mr. Bedlam disappeared shortly after his birth, leaving Emily Bedlam to raise the child in a tenement while she paints china in a dreadful factory in their Vauxhall neighborhood, saving pennies for Tom’s education. Life gets worse when his awful mountebank of a father returns and steals his wife’s savings. Tom has to take on the brutal job of stoking the furnaces that fire the pottery, and he fancies himself happy enough. There is, after all, the opportunity to explore the topography of his lavishly built coworker Sissy, even as he ignores the love of Audrey, one of the daughters of the large rackety Limpkin family across the landing. Then Emily’s sanity and health fail, bringing both her estranged husband and estranged father, a wealthy brewer, to her deathbed. The brewer sends Tom off to school, where he acquires manners and a start on the path to a career in medicine. At the school he is the only witness to the murder of a much-bullied friend. The murderer, in the best Dickensian tradition, will turn up later, wealthy and important. Tom, with support from the father of the murderer, becomes a doctor and a gentleman. Desperate to be the father he never had, he elopes with one of two equally loving sisters to South Africa and becomes a family man whose three daughters and one fey son draw him back to England and the terrors of the Great War.
Like the Forsytes saga, worth continuing for four or five more volumes.Pub Date: June 12, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6222-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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
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