A well-wrought panorama of small-town dramas and discontents.
A boy growing up alone in a hardscrabble Texas town weathers poverty, violence, and heartbreak in this coming-of-age saga.
Archuleta’s (Rio Sonora, 2010, etc.) tense stories unfold like chapters in a novella about a boy named Josh struggling to make his way in the 1950s and ’60s. In “Jolie Blon,” readers meet little Josh living in a tent with his mother, Belle, and an itinerant farm laborer named Cecil. The boy’s unsettled life is upended when the frustrated Belle steals Cecil’s car, sells it for quick cash, and packs Josh onto a Greyhound. In the gothic “La Tormenta,” readers discover Belle abandoned Josh in a nameless west Texas hamlet. He goes to school, earns his keep—a cot and meals—by doing odd jobs, and observes the town’s darker undercurrents. In “Tormenta,” a wife’s infidelities spark macabre bloodshed, and in “Old Dan’s Lament,” the blighted life of a reclusive, bookish ranch hand maimed in the Korean War becomes grotesquely immediate. As Josh enters high school, the tales merge into episodes in a more conventional adolescent yarn. He scores a touchdown in the homecoming game—rendered with gripping play-by-play by Archuleta. And Josh gets the attention of Missy, the flirty daughter of an affluent rancher who tantalizes him by playing Beethoven on the piano and making out with him in a truck, and Roble, a down-to-earth Mexican-American girl who dreams of becoming a doctor. Dirt poor and with few prospects, Josh wonders how he could fit into either girl’s life as he scrounges work, hangs out at the gas station, and fends off hooligans. Josh is a bit blank—good-hearted but unformed and unambitious. Fortunately, Archuleta surrounds him with more colorful and charismatic characters, from a no-nonsense deputy and a flinty rancher to a tart-tongued, motherly diner waitress. Josh’s town is convincingly crafted from punchy, plainspoken dialogue—“Anyone helping me on this, well, no more beer until it’s over,” a lawman admonishes his posse—and windswept landscapes. (“Tumbleweeds bounced and rolled across dry fields until they became tangled and trapped along the fence lines and as the wind blew south toward the town, it gathered more dirt from the fields and pushed it higher until it formed a great dark rolling cloud, gaining speed and dimming daylight.”) The result is an atmospheric Texas bildungsroman reminiscent of Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show.
A well-wrought panorama of small-town dramas and discontents.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4575-5919-8
Page Count: 141
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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