A young man's trip to hell and back for true love, told with a quirky combination of brutality and charm.
Trouble abounds when a young man makes a terrible miscalculation, then pursues the love of his life in an effort to set things right.
Young Jesus has the cards stacked against him. His schizophrenic mother gave him an unusual name and a tragic incident of child abuse has scarred him, both physically and emotionally. The vivacious and hypersexed girl next door, Maddie, has set her sights on Jesus and nothing will dissuade her, not even her ultrareligious mother's fire-and-brimstone warnings about men. But when Jesus says the wrong thing at the wrong time, Maddie takes off, setting in motion a catastrophic chain of events. After she leaves Jesus, Maddie finds herself in the wrong neighborhood of Cottondale. Her naive head is turned by George, a narcissistic sociopath living large on the wrong side of the law, doing others' dirty work and delivering unsuspecting victims to a sadistic albino hermaphroditic serial killer known as The Sole Taker, who lives alone in an isolated mansion. George grabs Maddie and sells her to a prostitution ring. Meanwhile, Jesus tries to find her with the assistance of a motley crew of friends, including a well-meaning barkeeper and her sexually precocious daughter, a pair of prostitutes with hearts of gold and a biker-cum-older brother figure. As Maddie and Jesus work their way back to each other and inadvertently ever closer to The Sole Taker, the themes of love, family and forgiveness are explored with jazzy prose and gorgeous examples of metaphor. Leverett sets a few disturbingly graphic scenes that include violence, sex and child abuse amidst a vivid and dynamic cast of characters with big personalities involved in a satisfying crime tale, À la Pulp Fiction. The star-crossed lovers at the center of the plot are highlighted against a gritty story about the dark side of Cottondale. Although infused with a generous dose of black humor, this tale is, at its heart, strikingly sentimental.
A young man's trip to hell and back for true love, told with a quirky combination of brutality and charm.Pub Date: March 12, 2026
ISBN: 9798251832259
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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