A funny, poignant tale of an imperfect paradise.
Buried secrets churn beneath the placid surface of a small town in this tragicomic debut novel.
Once a station on the Underground Railroad and later a Ku Klux Klan stronghold in the 1920s, the village of Heaven, Indiana, has a tangled history of grace and sin. Maher begins its beguiling saga in 1954, when Madame Gajikanes, a Romani fortuneteller passing through with a traveling carnival (her decidedly non-Romani real name is Nancy White), finds a newborn infant left in a basket at her tent. She duly raises the baby girl, named Nadja, to be a carnie performer who specializes in telling fortunes from dirty dinner dishes (“It’s like tea-leaf reading. I read from the pattern left on your plate after you’ve eaten”). Nadja’s wanderings intersect with the lives of Ellie Denson, a waitress at Clara’s Kitchen who wishes she too had the gumption to get out of Heaven, and Sue Ellen Sue Tipton, whose House of Beauty becomes the clearinghouse for artful gossip thanks to her phenomenal head for town lore. Also threading through the tale are aging farm couple Helen and Lester Breck. When Helen decides that Lester is not really Lester but a farmhand who looks just like him, the long-suffering husband takes his wife’s delusions in stride while covertly seeking consolation with other women. There’s more than enough death and derangement in Maher’s yarn for a prairie gothic potboiler, but she defuses the melodrama in a well-observed comedy of rural manners that breaks down larger villainies into smaller misdemeanors, tinging all of it with a wisp of magical realism. (Fortunetelling, it turns out, is 99 percent reconnaissance and 1 percent something else.) The author’s prose manages evocative flights—“Elephants paced restlessly, their immense feet beating slow syncopations”—but it dwells mainly in small-town naturalism rendered in pitch-perfect dialogue by sharply drawn characters whose folksiness still encompasses layers of complication and conflict. A bit like a darker-tinged version of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon narrative, Maher’s fictive universe unfolds with richly humorous details and expansive meaning.
A funny, poignant tale of an imperfect paradise.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2000
ISBN: 978-0-9703993-0-4
Page Count: 169
Publisher: Dog Hollow Press
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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