Undemanding and very tame fare that avoids offending anyone.
In the sixth in Medlicott’s series about lively senior citizens in Covington, N.C. (At Home in Covington, 2004, etc.), the new pastor overcomes a couple of crises with help from the local ladies.
Although they show up when needed, Hannah, Grace and especially Amelia take a less prominent role here than they have previously. Young Pastor Denny Ledbetter has taken over the local congregation to relieve the ailing Pastor Johnson, who for years acted as a father surrogate to the orphaned Denny and paid his way through seminary. While cleaning out the church attic with Grace, Denny discovers proof that 40 years earlier, the church briefly employed an un-ordained minister who performed five marriage ceremonies for which he never filed the proper papers. As a result, five of the community’s longest-married couples are not really married in the eyes of God. After some soul-searching, Denny breaks the news to the couples. The Herrills and the Craines, both upstanding members of the community, soon agree that holding a joint wedding ceremony on Christmas Eve would be a lovely way to renew their vows. The other three couples, all from a less genteel part of town, take some convincing, but eventually they too agree to be part of the ceremony—even poor Mary McCorkle, whose marriage has been less than happy. Now a new crisis arises—the sorry disrepair into which the church building has fallen. While the ladies light a fire under the men folk to help Denny refurbish the church, a mysterious visitor from France underwrites a new furnace, but will it be installed in time? Don’t worry too much; suspense is not a high priority for Medlicott, who designs her tales for comfort above all else.
Undemanding and very tame fare that avoids offending anyone.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7434-9921-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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