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ZACK'S DAUGHTERS

Name: ZACK'S DAUGHTERS
Author: James Kreidler
ISBN: 978-1456849436

by James Kreidler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 10, 2011

An utterly disturbing, but often absorbing, family saga with lots of moving pieces.

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Kreidler’s novel charts the growth and decline of the tragic Neiway family across the first half of the 20th century.

When we meet Zack Neiway, he has already married two women, fathered eight children and died. The story then jumps back in time from small-town Wisconsin in the late 1950s to 1916, where two girls, Rachel and Martha, brush one another’s hair and dream about the future. This first of many leaps in time and perspective provides an early glimpse of Zack’s first and second wives. Rachel and Zack soon meet and marry, leaving Martha behind. Rachel gives birth to two daughters and two sons, but an increasingly dissatisfying home life is altogether shattered when she commits suicide. The act seems entirely out of character for a devoutly Catholic mother—faith, its powers and failures are major themes in the narrative—but flashbacks reveal that Rachel’s death is tied to her horrifying discovery about Zack and his daughters. Into this darkness walks Martha, Rachel’s oldest friend, who, if she doesn’t love Zack, at least feels duty-bound to care for the family Rachel left behind. Martha takes over Rachel’s role completely, becoming wife to her husband, mother to her children and, eventually, bearing Zack three daughters and a son. Martha is quick-witted and resourceful, but entirely oblivious to the misdeeds of her husband—which only continue, described in scenes that grow increasingly graphic. The book tells of one family’s twisted secret as it plays out over several decades; it’s an ambitious task, and one the author handles by constantly switching the focus from one character to the next. But there are so many Neiways, and so many strange and terrible things happening to them, that the reader becomes desensitized. Kreidler tackles an extreme taboo, and packs in too many tragic and exotic deaths on top of it. But in-between, he also crafts sentences that are delicate and moving. “The dress smelled somewhat of mothballs, which embarrassed Addie a bit in front of her classmates, but the odor faded, and she understood that life was limited”—writing like this is quietly sad, but gets lost amid so much overt tragedy.

An utterly disturbing, but often absorbing, family saga with lots of moving pieces.

Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2011

ISBN: 978-1456849436

Page Count: 207

Publisher: Xlibris

Review Posted Online: March 28, 2011

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.