An engaging, if uneven, look at the problems of rural Alaska through the eyes of a teen.
An Alaska teenager sorts out her complicated family and campaigns for girls’ self-esteem and independence.
In this debut contemporary novel, Sobey introduces 17-year-old Crystal M. Rose (named, like her younger brother, JD, for one of her parents’ preferred substances), who writes songs in response to the drug use, objectification of girls, and general malaise she sees among her peers in small-town Alaska. With the help of her best friend, Kato, who runs his own blog advocating for the Native community, Crystal launches the book’s titular endeavor to share her songs with a wider audience. (The lyrics are featured in the novel’s text, and a companion website, thewarblog.com, includes recordings.) The songs draw a mixture of scorn and support from her classmates and attention from politicians and the broader community, including Crystal and JD’s long-absent father, who poses a threat to his children. After Crystal and her loved ones relocate to Kato’s coastal village when their house is destroyed, she begins communicating with a blog commenter, setting in motion further family and community drama and reconciliation. Sobey, a resident of rural Alaska, portrays Crystal’s world with an insider’s perspective, vividly depicting the environment and traditions—the protagonist participates in a whale harvest—while also presenting a community nearly destroyed by drugs, alcohol (JD was named for Jack Daniel’s), and violence. The complex story of Crystal’s relatives and the lies they tell is well-executed, and Sobey keeps the many layers of the narrative balanced. But while Crystal’s passionate defense of girls who exist to satisfy boys’ desires is genuine, her enthusiasm often becomes judgmental (“How did your daughter turn into a drug addict?” she asks her grandparents; she tells a pregnant teen: “You’re going to have to teach her to not make the same mistakes”). And the protagonist’s interpretation of problems in the Native community (“Deep down, they believed their culture to be less….Somehow they needed to purge themselves and find a better path”) is off-putting.
An engaging, if uneven, look at the problems of rural Alaska through the eyes of a teen.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68433-147-5
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2018
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
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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