Complex, assured stories that describe the complications of love and need with perfect pitch.
These well-observed short stories describe sometimes-uneasy, sometimes-hopeful reconciliations with fortune.
Most of the 24 short stories in this collection previously appeared in literary journals; some have been altered slightly for this publication. In the title story—which captures a mood underlying many in the collection—an unnamed couple’s road to marriage begins with adopting a pug and proceeds from there like some blandly idyllic TV montage: they walk the dog, name him Prince, and enjoy his excited jumping up and down; they get corporate jobs, plan a small wedding, and have the ceremony in a park gazebo. When disaster upends them, Prince has a new home, “but he would never jump up and down. Instead, he would…spend his every night at the door, waiting, unable to believe in fate.” Named or unnamed, male or female, young or old, the characters in these stories struggle more or less successfully to believe in their fates. Sometimes, as in “The Driver,” rhythms of marriage and friendship ease the process. Maggie accompanies her second husband, Frank—20 years her senior—to the Department of Motor Vehicles, where he fails a vision test. Afterward, they bicker on a safe topic—“I’ll be damned if I’m going to Bob Evans”—until “the discomfort of Frank’s new reality dissolved.” The car’s engine, like their marriage, settles, after an initial kick, “into a comfortable hum.” The stories are arranged well to bring similar themes together: parents, children, and siblings; addicts, criminals, and twelve-steppers; workplaces; disasters, natural and otherwise. In many passages, Knox (Don’t Tease the Elephants, 2014, etc.) displays a keen pithiness: the pug’s “bunched face,” an old man’s insight about the ruthlessness shared by CEOs and addicts: “You got the really out and out and the really up and up, and they’re both the same kind of fucked up. That’s why they hate each other so much.”
Complex, assured stories that describe the complications of love and need with perfect pitch.Pub Date: May 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-1495106125
Page Count: 185
Publisher: Rain Mountain Press
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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