Well enough executed, but a victim of emotional excess.
An overloaded love story, set mostly in ranch country, flirts with big issues—parental bonding, mathematical intelligence, and destiny—as a young woman falls in love with a married man.
Sarah Bryden has lived with her grandparents in a small Kansas town ever since her grandfather lost his leg in a blasting operation and she had to leave college. She’s an artist, and when she’s not waiting tables or tutoring high school kids, she paints delicate flower pictures in her room. Meanwhile, she’s seeing local man but she’s not yet over a love affair with a Britisher who left her when she became pregnant (the baby was stillborn). Sarah’s life picks up when handsome John Wilde and his wife Susan—a wealthy businesswoman—move back from California to be with Susan’s mother while they try to raise recently adopted baby Will. John, a mathematical genius, is happiest when working with equations, but he’s troubled by Susan’s attitude toward Will. The baby is sickly and difficult, and after Sarah helps out one evening, Susan increasingly leaves him in her care. Sarah and John are drawn to each other, especially after Susan is injured and Will stays with Sarah temporarily, bringing them even closer together. Susan, now recovered and actively disliking her son, offers John an ultimatum: either Will goes or she does. While he wrestles with this decision, he and Sarah confess their feelings for each other, but a flood creates even further problems when Susan, with Will in the car, gets caught in the raging water. Will drowns, and a confused and grieving John heads back with Susan to California, his heart no longer in the marriage. Meantime, Sarah, pregnant with John’s child, goes to France to look at the art, then stays on. Misunderstandings and surprises ensue, of course, but what’s destined can’t be avoided.
Well enough executed, but a victim of emotional excess.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14629-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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
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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