Crusader Nurse plays Lady Bountiful to the Appalachian poor in this latest Day-Glo medical minimus by book-a-year-man Denker. Kate Kincaid, newly burned by a battle to unseat a malpracticing doctor, leaves a Midwestern university hospital and travels to West Virginia. There she'll study and train for one year at Appalachian Mountain Hospital under the iron rule of heart-of-gold director Abbott, qualifying as a Family Nurse Practitioner and Midwife. Together with two peers, one a nun, Kate does her boot training, studying, and clinic working with the help of resident doc Ray Boyd—who just might, one thinks at this point, elbow out Kate's everloving lawyer-lover Howard Brewster. Meanwhile, Kate also learns how to handle the natives, a poor but proud lot, and "talk folks." Among the hill people: landlady Aunt Elvira Russell, a former nurse; an ancient, tobacco-chewing diabetic who ain't allowing she knows where her sugar's coming from; a rattlesnake-twirling preacher who gets bit; an elderly retired professor of regional anthropology; and child Eloise, only bright chick of a decent, hard-scrabble couple, who writes poetry. (Kate wins her battle to have Eloise educated at IQ level.) Then, after a stretch on the lonesome-trail-and-cabin route, Kate studies midwifery under Dr. Boyd: "for the next six months, you'll be concerned with only one thing. Life!" Predictably there are a number of birthings—one a cabin delivery of extreme difficulty. But Kate will next volunteer to take over an outpost clinic—where bits of diagnosing, jollying, treating, and virtuouso sleuthing ensue. (One man's infertility problem is caused by too-snug jockey shorts.) And finally there's a huge flood from a strip-mining mud slide. . . and guess who comes through as heroine to the whir of TV cameras? With pseudo-Foxfire natives and case after hurting, heaving case: Super Nurse wins all hearts—in a pop formula old as them that hills.
Pub Date: May 1, 1984
ISBN: 0688023657
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1984
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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