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INVERTED HEART

Name: INVERTED HEART
Author: James Patrick Graham
ISBN: 978-1492714217

by James Patrick Graham ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 18, 2013

A timely, meticulously wrought tale of young manhood gone wrong that never quite gets to the heart of the matter.

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In Graham’s debut novel, a troubled young man experiences tragedy when he goes too far in his quest to become a hometown hero.

When Officer Peter Logan of the Smithton, Ill., police department arrives at Mike Burke’s home to arrest him, the events unfold with a weary inevitability: Mike doesn’t bother to resist, and his parents sadly stand by on the front porch. As residents of the small, economically depressed town drive by, they slow down to eagerly catch a glimpse of the action. Years of gradual marginalization led Mike to this point, and his story unfolds in a series of methodical flashbacks triggered by Mike’s police-car ride through town. Readers learn that Peter and Mike played cops and robbers together as children and that Peter, the son of a real-life policeman, always made Mike play the bad guy. As the years went by, Peter developed into a callous, confident high-school sports star while Mike grew increasingly withdrawn and fixated on hypermasculine role models such as Rocky Balboa and a local Desert Storm veteran. Mike’s attempt to enlist in the Army after high school was stymied by a birth defect—the “inverted heart” of the novel’s title. As a grown man living at home and working at a dead-end grocery store job, Mike’s hunger for recognition finally gave way to a misguided act of violence that no one saw coming. At its most effective, Graham’s slow, methodical prose manages to mimic the gradual erosion of Mike’s humanity. His decidedly thin characterizations of most of the supporting players also hint at Mike’s increasingly impassive regard for others—a trait that eventually leads to his downfall. Too often, however, these devices make for rather tedious reading, particularly for those seeking a closer connection to the characters. They impose a psychological distance that may prevent readers from truly relating to Mike, or the reasons behind his numbing crime.

A timely, meticulously wrought tale of young manhood gone wrong that never quite gets to the heart of the matter.

Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2013

ISBN: 978-1492714217

Page Count: 288

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2014

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.