Gritty characters solidify an intelligent story and an abstract concept.
Various culprits—linked in numerous ways—become involved in murder and other illicit deeds in this debut literary/crime novel.
In 2044, Geena Nuss gets word that one of her parents is dead. The story then hops back 60 years, when Geena’s mother, Beth Sturgess, is living as a drug-addled prostitute. She escapes the life with help from Massachusetts stripper Joe Tink, who gets her a job aboard a boat. But that vessel takes her to Bermuda, where she ultimately lives with a man who, according to locals, is a slave owner and rapist. Other characters gradually enter—and re-enter—the narrative, from Beth’s eventual husband, Kevin Nuss, who’s a cop, to Joe’s lover Martin Case, a math professor. Some have multiple connections: Ellen McKinnon meets Martin at a hotel bar, but she has ties to individuals in other, surprising ways. Nearly everyone has a dark past, including someone seeking revenge and another who’s a serial killer. By the mid-21st century, Geena is alone, her family members either dead or living elsewhere. Trying to reunite with an old friend and her estranged brother, Davis, she may soon learn the essential part that physics has played in everybody’s lives. Danenbarger excels at developing characters, which considerably benefits a story of intersecting lives. Some backstories as well as the players themselves are unsettling or unsavory, though they never fail to engage. But the best moments are the links among characters via encounters and unexpected relationships. These even induce suspense: Successive chapter titles cite a “Friday” of impending doom, with a car wreck, which Kevin witnesses, that’s bound to involve established characters. While the author astutely describes quantum entanglement as a possible reason for the interconnected characters, he wisely keeps the titular concept ambiguous and the ending wide open. Nevertheless, the novel’s timeline is, in a few instances, perplexing. For example, Geena is “in her fifties” in 2044, but her parents meet in 1997; and Beth refers to a quarter century as “several years.”
Gritty characters solidify an intelligent story and an abstract concept.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-55503-4
Page Count: 380
Publisher: StormBlock Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2019
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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