The slight tale crumbles under too much scrutiny but beautifully expresses emotional longing in ways both natural and...
After a grimly realistic portrayal of postwar East Berlin in The Betrayal (2010), Dunmore offers up an eerie story about postwar England that may, or may not, be a ghost story.
In 1952, newlyweds Isabel and Philip move to East Riding where Philip has taken his first job as a doctor. While Philip plunges into his work, Isabel is lonely and adrift in her own life. Mrs. Atkinson, the dour elderly landlady, is always pacing the floor above, and Isabel’s downstairs apartment is dank and cold; looking in a closet for an extra blanket, she comes across a military greatcoat and wraps herself in it for warmth. Another night not long afterward, she wakes to a tapping at the window and finds a young pilot staring in and calling her nickname, Issy. The pilot begins visiting regularly. Whether he’s a ghost or figment of her imagination remains unclear. Together they visit a nearby World War II airfield; she sees abandoned disrepair, but to him, the base is in full wartime operation. They make love. Afterward, she stands in front of her house with him unseen by the local woman. She inexplicably knows his name is Alec and that he is waiting to fly a bombing mission to Germany that has been delayed. She finds herself increasingly filled with another woman’s memories—a farmhouse, a baby, Alec. Meanwhile, she and the touchingly drawn Philip repeatedly fumble their attempts at love and intimacy. When Isabel witnesses Alec and Mrs. Atkinson share an exchange of terrible longing, she sees why Alec actually has appeared.
The slight tale crumbles under too much scrutiny but beautifully expresses emotional longing in ways both natural and supernatural.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2060-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
The perils of country living are brought to light in a confidently executed novel.
Family bonds are twisted and broken in Jordan’s meditation on the fallen South.
Debut novelist Jordan won the 2006 Bellwether Prize for this disquieting reflection on rural America, told from multiple perspectives. After steadfastly guarding her virginity for three decades, cosmopolitan Memphis schoolmarm Laura Chappell agrees to marry a rigid suitor named Henry McAllan, and in 1940 they have their first child. At the end of World War II, Henry drags his bride, their now expanded brood and his sadistic Pappy off to a vile, primitive farm in the backwaters of Mississippi that she names “Mudbound.” Promised an antebellum plantation, Laura finds that Henry has been fleeced and her family is soon living in a bleak, weather-beaten farmhouse lacking running water and electricity. Resigned to an uncomfortable truce, the McAllans stubbornly and meagerly carve out a living on the unforgiving Delta. Their unsteady marriage becomes more complicated with the arrival of Henry’s enigmatic brother Jamie, plagued by his father’s wrath, a drinking problem and the guilt of razing Europe as a bomber pilot. Adding his voice to the narrative is Ronsel Jackson, the son of one of the farm’s tenants, whose heroism as a tank soldier stands for naught against the racism of the hard-drinking, deeply bigoted community. Punctuated by an illicit affair, a gruesome hate crime and finally a quiet, just murder in the night, the book imparts misery upon the wicked—but the innocent suffer as well. “Sometimes it’s necessary to do wrong,” claims Jamie McAllan in the book’s equivocal dénouement. “Sometimes it’s the only way to make things right.”
The perils of country living are brought to light in a confidently executed novel.Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-56512-569-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.
Things are about to get bloody for a group of Charleston housewives.
In 1988, the scariest thing in former nurse Patricia Campbell’s life is showing up to book club, since she hasn’t read the book. It’s hard to get any reading done between raising two kids, Blue and Korey, picking up after her husband, Carter, a psychiatrist, and taking care of her live-in mother-in-law, Miss Mary, who seems to have dementia. It doesn’t help that the books chosen by the Literary Guild of Mt. Pleasant are just plain boring. But when fellow book-club member Kitty gives Patricia a gloriously trashy true-crime novel, Patricia is instantly hooked, and soon she’s attending a very different kind of book club with Kitty and her friends Grace, Slick, and Maryellen. She has a full plate at home, but Patricia values her new friendships and still longs for a bit of excitement. When James Harris moves in down the street, the women are intrigued. Who is this handsome night owl, and why does Miss Mary insist that she knows him? A series of horrific events stretches Patricia’s nerves and her Southern civility to the breaking point. (A skin-crawling scene involving a horde of rats is a standout.) She just knows James is up to no good, but getting anyone to believe her is a Sisyphean feat. After all, she’s just a housewife. Hendrix juxtaposes the hypnotic mundanity of suburbia (which has a few dark underpinnings of its own) against an insidious evil that has taken root in Patricia’s insular neighborhood. It’s gratifying to see her grow from someone who apologizes for apologizing to a fiercely brave woman determined to do the right thing—hopefully with the help of her friends. Hendrix (We Sold Our Souls, 2018, etc.) cleverly sprinkles in nods to well-established vampire lore, and the fact that he’s a master at conjuring heady 1990s nostalgia is just the icing on what is his best book yet.
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68369-143-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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