Potent and intoxicating: a dangerously seductive book.
A twisting, Rashomon-like novel about a high-school girl who vanishes for several weeks, then returns, to accusations that she faked her abduction.
On Nov. 7, 1985, 16-year-old Mary Veal slipped away from field-hockey practice at her posh suburban Boston school. On New Year’s Eve, she reappeared, sitting on a bench near the athletic fields, claiming to have been abducted. Forced into therapy by her domineering mother, Mary faces her toughest challenge yet. The book begins omniscient in a glimpse entitled “What Might Have Happened.” The story then deftly shifts from Mary’s life in 1999 to that of Dr. Hammer, her therapist in 1986. As the three voices alternate, Julavits slowly reveals the totality of Mary’s experience. Hammer’s perspective is clinical, but Mary is no ordinary patient. In Mary’s therapy sessions, we see the power of a girl in bloom. Mary is petulant, frustrated, caged. Hammer opines that she is extremely intelligent and crafty. There are substantial similarities to an earlier case involving another girl from the same school, ultimately proven to be false. Mary’s mother, Paula, the proud offspring of a Salem witch, lives up to her family heritage by condemning Mary’s act as one of pure defiance. For Paula Veal, damage control for the family reputation is far more important. Hammer goes on to author a bestselling book about a hypothetical Miriam, a young girl with a pathological gift for imagination. Mary’s disappearance seems to begin and end as fiction. Branded a liar, she becomes a pariah. In 1999, however, Mary has returned home for the funeral of her mother. As ghosts from her past swirl around her, she begins a ritual that opens up dark places. What really happened in 1985 is a fragment of a much larger story. An older, wiser Mary is now ready to confront her demons. Julavits (The Effects of Living Backwards, 2003, etc.), a founding editor of The Believer, perfectly captures the siren call of adolescent women, and the aftermath of those who are lured in.
Potent and intoxicating: a dangerously seductive book.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-51323-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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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