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THE SWEET BY & BY

Name: THE SWEET BY & BY
Author: Jeanne Mackin
ISBN: 0-312-26997-8

by Jeanne Mackin ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

Mackin (Dreams of Empire, 1996, etc.) offers a deft combination of historical fiction and ghost story, as well as a...

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A journalist researching the story of a real-life 19th-century spiritualist, Maggie Fox, may have to contend with the ghost of her old lover.

Living alone in a rambling old house in upstate New York, Helen West is mourning in almost Victorian fashion the death of her lover Jude. When she is asked to write a long biographical article on Maggie Fox, she accepts, since the subject of spiritualism, and the Fox sisters in particular, was a favorite of Jude's. At first appalled at Maggie's duplicity, she slowly begins to crave for herself a connection with the dead. The story flips between Helen's narrative and the life of Maggie Fox—a fascinating piece of history in itself. Farm children amusing themselves on a winter night, Maggie and Leah Fox created an international craze, and what some at the time termed a new religion. By dexterously cracking their toe joints to produce mysterious rappings, they claimed to speak with the dead, and soon people were willing to pay to hear those conversations. Under the guidance of her evil older sister, Maggie set up shop in New York, where she soon became rich and famous (her clients included Horace Greeley and Mary Todd Lincoln). But she was also a prisoner of Leah's domination and of the laudanum she was given to keep her in line. As Helen becomes more sympathetic to Maggie, strange doings make her wonder whether the ghost of Jude has come to her—a welcome apparition, although poorly timed: Helen is now attempting a new relationship after three lonely years mourning Jude, who, she discovers, was not the man he seemed.

Mackin (Dreams of Empire, 1996, etc.) offers a deft combination of historical fiction and ghost story, as well as a compelling meditation on the power of the past to alter the present.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-312-26997-8

Page Count: 304

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST COLLECTION
by Jeanne Mackin

- BOOK REVIEW
DREAMS OF EMPIRE
by Jeanne Mackin

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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

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

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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.