Impressively researched, persuasively detailed: a first novel destined to become a reading club favorite.
Two women of different generations—and worlds—find both fulfillment and disenchantment on “the world’s most remote island.”
In 1913, Englishwoman Elsa Pendleton Beazley, having put behind her a career as a governess and an unresolved relationship with her German employer, embarks with her much older husband Edward, a research scientist, on a journey to the eponymous South Pacific island. The couple are accompanied by Elsa’s mentally disabled, volatile younger sister Alice, to whom Elsa is both sibling and de facto mother. In parallel narratives, Vanderbes describes the movements of a German naval fleet pursued by British warships, which anchored off (and perhaps visited) Easter Island—and also the 1973 journey of Dr. Greer Faraday, whose mission is to study the island’s ecosystem in hopes of determining how plant life came to a seemingly barren island “Fifteen hundred miles from another landmass.” Vanderbes painstakingly fills in details of former experiences that have shaped her characters’ attitudes—notably (and a bit turgidly) Greer’s estrangement from her late husband Thomas, following allegations of academic fraud. The heart of the story, though, is the island’s impenetrable mysteriousness, and Vanderbes extracts considerable drama and tension from questions not susceptible to final answers. What is the meaning of the fabled stone statues (moai), relics of an earlier age, that face inland toward what was once a wilderness? And of the stone tablets containing undecipherable pictographic writing (rongorongo)? Is there a recorded history that mocks its pursuers, or only mute ruined evidence of an island paradise destroyed by its contact with “superior” civilizations? A most satisfying partial resolution is given in the closing pages, focused on the fates of Alice and of the German fleet, as well as on the answers for which Greer Faraday eventually settles.
Impressively researched, persuasively detailed: a first novel destined to become a reading club favorite.Pub Date: June 3, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-33673-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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