An absorbing story about how it sometimes takes silence to make a person hear.
Facing an imminent operation that will leave her permanently deaf, a teenage girl tries to make certain that her life is in order before the world of sound vanishes forever in this debut novel by college student Abelson.
Seventeen-year-old Charlotte Goode suffers from a rare genetic disorder called Type II Neurofibromatosis that causes tumors to constantly pop up along her nervous system. Now she has found out that tumors are growing on her auditory nerves and that the operation to remove them will leave her permanently deaf—a frightening prospect made even worse by her love of music. As the operation approaches, her boss at the music magazine gives her an assignment to pick a local band for a benefit. Both of the boys who lead the respective bands in contention attract her, and she doesn’t know which to choose. As she wrestles with the decision, her family life is in upheaval. Will she be able to resolve everything before her operation? This is an impressive first novel by the author, who based it on the accounts of a woman who suffered from Type II Neurofibromatosis. Although most characters are well-drawn and complete, the best is Charlotte. She faces life and the news of her impending deafness with a mixture of wry observations and down-to-earth practicality, with nary a trace of self-pity. The author wisely refrains from filling pages with rhapsodic descriptions of the sound of birds, the roar of the ocean, the whispering of the wind, etc., which would have quickly grown tiresome and maudlin. The plot of the book is trite, basically boiling down to: Who is Mr. Right? What saves it from being an After School Special is how Charlotte handles her impending deafness with maturity. An unsatisfying note is struck by Charlotte’s brother-in-law, who seems to not like Charlotte because of her illness. One wishes that he would suffer just a little comeuppance for his mean-spiritedness. Otherwise, the novel moves smartly to its conclusion, with plenty of poignant moments along the way.
An absorbing story about how it sometimes takes silence to make a person hear.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1475273090
Page Count: 272
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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