An intense, sometimes-brutal novel about acknowledging and escaping an abusive relationship.
In Danbury’s debut novel, a marriage begins to crumble under the stress of abuse and mental illness.
Rich Bryson is a freelance cameraman working in television production. He has steady work, and he’s excited to be marrying Tami Matthews, a beautiful aspiring actress who can also sing and dance: “It was just a matter of time before it was her turn to shine,” she thinks to herself. Early on, Tami shows signs of an alarming temper, as when she gets a parking ticket and loudly curses the entire city of Anaheim, California. After a wedding that Tami has carefully orchestrated—but which still fails to satisfy her wish for perfection—she and Rich settle into their new life as a married couple. Soon, Tami begins flying into rages and taking it out on her husband—hitting him and pulling out chunks of his hair. When she discovers that her sibling is pursuing acting, she hits a new level of fury, screaming, “I hate my brother!” As a result, the abuse escalates, and Rich starts to fear his wife. The physical and psychological tolls then start to interfere with his work. Meanwhile, Tami’s mental health seems to be eroding: She starts talking to herself, repeating the phrase, “It doesn’t go with that”; she hears voices and grins maniacally; and her words and actions become stranger and more alarming. Rich gets help from his siblings, who formulate a plan to save him from Tami, but she has no plans to make it easy for him to leave. The novel’s short chapters move quickly, wasting little time on the relationship’s halcyon days. When moments of abuse occasionally give way to intimate moments of reconnection, Danbury shows how the protagonist rekindles his hope for a loving relationship: “Rich never knew what to expect anymore.” The author has a good sense of pace and tension, which he ratchets up during scenes of domestic cruelty. He also has a knack for rendering vivid action. But when the prose gets more figurative, it struggles to maintain the same clarity. For instance, when Rich and Tami return from an idyllic anniversary weekend, a tragic discovery exacerbates Tami’s fragile mental state: “Instantaneously, a glacial chunk of her remaining sanity had cleaved away and was ripped to smithereens, and what was left of her fragile world crumpled like a house of cards in a hurricane.” The general aim is apparent here, but the metaphors are too mixed to mean very much. Tami initially seems like an unlikely abuser, but her behavior becomes far less surprising as Danbury shows the extent of her mental illness. It’s not always clear what her disorder is, however; she shows signs of narcissism, obsessive-compulsive behavior, and mania. The author never makes Tami a sympathetic character, but the evidence that she’s unwell saves her from seeming cartoonishly villainous. One highlight of the book is the soundtrack: Numerous mentions of songs pepper the novel, sometimes reflecting and sometimes belying the feelings of the characters.
An intense, sometimes-brutal novel about acknowledging and escaping an abusive relationship.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73334-400-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: JEFE PRESS
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2020
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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