Impressive craftsmanship and high imaginative quality distinguish an annual that’s becoming an essential.
Many roads are traveled in this sixth gathering of the best stories culled from the nation’s writing programs and conferences.
Novelist and critic Smiley (Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, p. 782) approvingly notes the benefits such institutions offer to both writers and readers—and there’s indeed much to stimulate readers’ brains in the range of subjects and effects these 15 stories encompass. Unfamiliar cultures and faraway places are explored in Matt Friedson’s depiction of life in, and out of, a “Reeducation Center for Delinquent Youths” in wartime Vietnam (“Liberty”) and Jessica Anthony’s claustrophobic monologue spoken by a U.S. World War II soldier stranded in a South Pacific jungle (“The Rust Preventer”). In alien cultures closer to home, Melanie Westerberg delineates the complex emotions of a female aquarium worker attracted by the sleek beauty of sharks (“Watermark”), and Andrew Foster Altschul’s conflicted narrator wrestles with mingled empathy and rage at a shelter for abused women (“A New Kind of Gravity”). Conventional narrative is deliberately fragmented by the sexually confused California slacker who narrates Albert E. Martinez’s “Useless Beauty . . .” (a story spun from an Esquire magazine feature) and in Kaui Hart Hemmings’s story of an alienated girl’s attempts to describe her feelings about her drug-dealing father (“Begin with an Outline”). Realism is eschewed altogether in Jennifer Shaff’s ruefully comic picture of a bereaved phys-ed teacher whose grief is healed by a “visitation” from Star Trek’s Mr. Spock (“Leave of Absence”). It’s equaled, perhaps surpassed by, Michelle Regalado Daetrick’s beautifully paced revelation of a lonely boy’s guilt over the accident that destroyed his family and shaped his later life (“Backfire”). This little masterpiece stands out among several varied depictions of filial conflict (Amber Dermont’s “Lyndon,” Gegory Plemmons’s plaintive “Twinless”) and family unhappiness (Sian M. Jones’s “Pilot,” Sean Ennis’s “Going After Lovely”).
Impressive craftsmanship and high imaginative quality distinguish an annual that’s becoming an essential.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-602901-4
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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