A deft, tragicomic evocation of Southern-fried nonconformism.
Two misfit scamps run rings around their foes in this coming-of-age novel, set in the post-war South.
In Atlanta, circa 1952, few people stick out more garishly than Billy Wilson, a 12-year-old transplanted Yankee with bright red hair, a grandiloquent vocabulary, a penchant for tap dancing and a yen to become a cheerleader. Ten-year-old tomboy Scooter Thompson is smitten with him, and the two become partners in juvenile hell-raising–stealing auto parts and candy, planting counterfeit money on assorted miscreants for the police to find, spying on neighbors and teachers and blackmailing them with the resulting intelligence. Their adventures get them involved with a raft of eccentrics, including a local bootlegger who’s become a city pillar, an alcoholic ex-con turned Pentecostal preacher, a bombshell exotic dancer who likes to bathe with teenage boys and Scooter’s beloved grandfather, whose little black book contains dark secrets about the Ku Klux Klan and his own past. Two marginal kids slightly misaligned with their surroundings, Billy and Scooter are avid, if wary, observers of a sometimes sweet, sometimes rancid South, taking in steamy revival meetings, hard-scrabble farm life, high school football crazes and the hypocrisies of genteel racism. The novel often feels like a bawdier, white-trash version of To Kill a Mockingbird. Abernathy’s tale doesn’t quite muster the resonance of Harper Lee’s, though, in part because his protagonists are undeveloped. Billy stays a flamboyant but uninvolving cipher, and Scooter seems unmarked by her passage out of childhood and into a tacked-on montage of adult life as a Broadway actress. Their struggle against bullies of many stripes remains a series of picturesque set pieces and character sketches that doesn’t generate much dramatic force. Still, Abernathy captures their colorful world and its pungent atmospherics with wit and verve.
A deft, tragicomic evocation of Southern-fried nonconformism.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-4196-8317-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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
BOOK REVIEW
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