Green’s 12th novel (Dune Road, 2009, etc.), so intent on a sort-of-happy ending, misses the mark.
Green’s latest summer novel is an uneasy mix of girly romance and cancer.
Once upon a time there were two sisters: Callie has a house in the country, two kids, a dreamy husband and a growing career as a photographer. Steffi is an up-and-coming vegan chef in New York, has a rock-star boyfriend and a charmingly irresponsible life. But because she’s deadly bored with the city (and her boyfriend and her job), Steffi decides to accept the generous offer of acquaintance Mason Gregory. While he and his filthy rich wife Olivia are in London for a year, Steffi will dog sit Fingal at their country house, which happens to be close to Callie’s place. Steffi loves the country, loves feeding the chickens and the goats, loves the quiet of the beautiful house and the little business she’s beginning, supplying healthy food to the town. But most importantly, she’s there for Callie, whose splitting headache has developed into a hospital stay, which leads to the diagnosis of terminal cancer. Their parents (who have been divorced for 30 years and never speak) come down from Maine; Callie’s driven husband Reece does the unthinkable—stops working to look after the children he barely knows; and best friend Lila becomes an advocate for Callie, navigating the family through the nightmare of her illness. An effervescent soul, Callie wants to live through her loved ones, and soon the fractured lives of those she cares about begin to come together, just as Callie lies dying. Green’s sad story (the novel is inspired by a close friend who died) seems more of a catalyst for romance and positive life change rather than a drama, resulting in an emotionally disjointed read.
Green’s 12th novel (Dune Road, 2009, etc.), so intent on a sort-of-happy ending, misses the mark.Pub Date: June 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02179-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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
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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