An affecting portrayal of a troubled teen’s journey toward redemption despite a facile ending.
In this YA novel for older teens, a hard-partying, drug-using teenage girl in trouble asks for help from her long-estranged grandfather, who’s facing a challenge of his own.
Harper, a spirited 16-year-old girl in Texas, doesn’t remember the last time that her parents praised her or told her they loved her. Her condemnatory father, Greg, the head of an ultraconservative religious private school, has already driven her older brother away; Harper has found personal validation in flaunting her sexuality and uses heroin with her college-age, drug-dealing boyfriend. A confrontation with her father is followed by her boyfriend’s betrayal and the discovery that she’s pregnant. Desperate to escape the mess that her life has become, Harper calls her grandfather Cooper—a novelist and songwriter in Alaska whom she hasn’t seen or talked to in 10 years—and asks for refuge. Cooper’s own life is crumbling after a diagnosis of early Alzheimer’s disease, but he’s determined to give Harper the help and unconditional love that he didn’t give his own daughter, whom he lost to drug addiction years ago. Sobey (The War Blog, 2018) vividly realizes the Alaska setting, and he frankly develops themes involving families torn apart by drug use and the sexual objectification of girls and women. He also offers a strong female protagonist who finds her voice and self-respect. The novel could be read as a just-say-no cautionary tale, as Sobey offers numerous, graphic examples of drug-related tragedy and ugly dysfunction, but its upbeat outcome feels unlikely. Harper and Cooper, however, are dynamic, complex, introspective characters who find, in each other, an accepting family at last. The warmth of their relationship leads a bit too conveniently to other familial reconciliations, new and rekindled romances, and an idealized resolution of Harper’s baby dilemma, but it has a lingering resonance.
An affecting portrayal of a troubled teen’s journey toward redemption despite a facile ending.Pub Date: June 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68433-297-7
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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