Standard romantic pabulum, but Alcott fans will find interesting tidbits to savor.
The title pretty much says it all about this first novel from McNees, an entry into the new subgenre that imagines the love life of spinster authoresses.
In her early 20s, Louisa moves to Walpole, N.H., for the summer with her financially strapped family: rigidly idealist father Bronson (portrayed with far more complexity in Geraldine Brooks’s Pulitzer-winning March), loving mother Marmee and sisters Anna, Lizzie and May, all obviously recognizable as the models for the Little Women characters. While Marmee hovers over frail Lizzie and spoils immature May, Anna and Louisa get to know the young people of the town. Conventional Anna falls in love with Nicholas Sutton, a wealthy young man who clearly reciprocates her feelings. Louisa, who already has literary aspirations, tries to resist her attraction to Joseph Singer, whose father runs the local dry-goods store and whose younger sister becomes May’s best friend. Louisa is as rude as possible to Joseph, but eventually his intelligence and sensitivity wear her down and the two share a kiss. But at a harvest dinner soon after, Mr. Sutton announces the engagement of Nicholas’s younger sister Nora to Joseph, an arrangement made by the fathers. Unfortunately, Joseph’s father is not only deathly ill but also on the brink of financial ruin, while heiress Nora requires a respectable fiancé to rehabilitate her tarnished reputation. Louisa is crushed, but she and Joseph rendezvous and make love. Nicholas dies in an accident; Anna leaves home to become a teacher; the Alcotts leave Walpole; and Louisa heads to Boston. She is despondent over a lack of publishing success when Joseph shows up. They make plans to run away, but then she receives word that The Saturday Evening Gazette has accepted her story, and she stands Joseph up at the station. Years later, now a famous author, she returns to Walpole to see him once again.
Standard romantic pabulum, but Alcott fans will find interesting tidbits to savor.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-399-15652-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Amy Einhorn/Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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