A well-crafted though sometimes sententious account of racial conflict.
Two men from the South—one white and one black—forge a friendship that challenges their notions about race.
When only 10, James Walker witnesses his cousin’s lynching by Klansmen, a gruesome spectacle that shakes him to the core. The Rev. Jones, his Baptist minister, consoles and inspires him to use education as a means to transcend the racial prejudice he will surely experience. James moves to Savannah, Georgia, to live with his Aunt Violet, a schoolteacher, who helps him achieve academic excellence and attend Morehouse College. After graduating cum laude, he enters the United States Air Force Officer Training Program. He continually encounters poisonous discrimination but responds with nonviolent protest. Meanwhile, Tom Stirling grows up on a peanut plantation in Georgia under the influence of omnipresent white supremacist views. Tom also enters the Air Force Officer Training Program and, en route to Biloxi, Mississippi, meets James—the first meeting between the two is an inauspicious one. But Tom eventually develops a deep respect for James’ intelligence, and an authentic friendship blossoms after James helps Tom recover from a debilitating injury while on tour in Vietnam. Debut author Kelsey slowly uncoils the protagonists’ moral revelations—both men are saddled with powerful, emotional reasons to be distrustful of the other. The author adroitly depicts the paradoxes of Southern culture—genteel civility and educational refinement pitted against brutal violence and blinkered racial prejudice. Kelsey’s writing is unfailingly clear, but he can slide into didacticism. Also, the dialogue can be bloodlessly earnest. Consider Tom’s unspoken self-reflection after he’s dumped by a girlfriend: “I can’t believe what just happened. We were so close. We needed each other. I know I fell for her, but maybe I was only fooling myself thinking she loved me.”
A well-crafted though sometimes sententious account of racial conflict.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9992217-0-9
Page Count: 390
Publisher: KrazyLegs Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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