A likable, quirky hero and delightful youngsters make this violent yarn appealing.
In this debut Western, a hardened bounty hunter runs into trouble in Texas.
It is the late 1880s, and the small town of Jackson, located in the dry, unforgiving terrain of East Texas, is about to be visited by an assortment of gunslingers and bounty hunters. Living on the outskirts of Jackson are five kids, ranging in age from 11 to 15—Samuel, Neddy, and Pete Pound and Clementine and Jackie Carver. The Pound children are being raised by their Baptist father, Ogilvie, a drunk. He is killed by moonshiner Vaney Jeffers just a few chapters into the book. The Carver siblings are looked after by their widowed mother, who spends many hours in the woods talking to her husband’s ghost. Meanwhile, over in Clay, Texas, Vernon, a tough bounty hunter with no last name (and a tender spot for women and children in danger), is waiting for the sheriff to process his reward money when he spies a man forcing a young Chickasaw woman into a barn. Vernon, who turns out to be the novel’s protagonist, follows. Before long, Vernon has freed the woman, Sky, and made an enemy of the county’s wealthiest resident, Wayne Mather. Unfortunately, Mather has a couple of brothers. It is time to get out of town. Shootouts will follow. In Sharp’s promising first novel, the action-fueled plot moves down the road to Jackson, maintaining a steady pace and ultimately threatening the Pound and Carver kids. The author delivers a strong protagonist and an engaging supporting cast. But the story has so many characters that keeping them all straight takes some effort. Happily, the montage of vignettes that results when all of the main players intersect is filled with enough lively dialogue and gently edgy prose (dropped casually into the narrative) to keep the audience charmed and amused: “Most folks tend to think of fate as chance, except for the Baptists who believe in the holy cookie cutter theory of existence, unless there is a poor outcome in which case fate is assigned a malevolent motive that is personal to the vexed individual.”
A likable, quirky hero and delightful youngsters make this violent yarn appealing.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4575-6249-5
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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