The “mystery” here reflects larger truths and keeps pages turning, but the texture, character and observation Williams gives...
Sharp and funny rock ’n’ roll elegy to youth and a disappearing way of life as Wales joins Europe’s shiny future.
Unfolding simultaneously in 1980 and 1999, the story continues Williams’s fond and vivid portrait of Cardiff, last seen in his collection Five Pubs, Two Bars and a Nightclub (1999), this time with the tale of the Wurriyas, a one-hit ska band. After nearly 20 years, ex-Wurriyas guitarist (and womanizer—art students and “little Goth girls” mostly) Mazz, approaching 40, returns to Cardiff, where his career began. While Mazz toured with second-billed bands, erstwhile singer Bobby, now a lesbian pimp, bassist Tyra, now a single mom, and guitarist Col all remained, as did Charlie Unger, drummer, local character, washed-up prizefighter, and Tyra’s absentee dad, whose death brings them all together again. In 1980, with Bobby Sands’s hunger strike in the background, the band went from local pubs to a brief moment in the spotlight, while Mazz and Tyra fell in love. When Tyra ended a pregnancy, though, they gave up as the band fell apart. In 1999, Mazz and Tyra, both lonely and aware of their age, fall together as they pursue the odd circumstances of Charlie’s death. Scarily thuggish but goodhearted Jason Flaherty, once the Wurriyas’s manager, is now a real-estate developer riding high on Cardiff’s building boom, which is turning the gritty docks and pubs of the Wurriyas’s heyday into a touristy waterfront mall. He pays Mazz to find the band’s drummer Emyr, who has famously disappeared but was seen with Charlie shortly before his death. While making a go of it with Tyra, Mazz tours the surfing beaches of Wales, where rumor places Emyr, and uncovers the heartless real-estate maneuvering that led to the death of Charlie (and the Cardiff he once knew).
The “mystery” here reflects larger truths and keeps pages turning, but the texture, character and observation Williams gives us are by themselves captivating and rewarding enough.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2001
ISBN: 1-58234-145-1
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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
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
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