A bit off-kilter as a coming-of-age story, but it succeeds as an account of an American abroad trying to escape—and see...
A recent graduate ditches Buffalo, New York, for a monthslong stay in a Mexican college town in this novel.
William James dreads the thought of a workaday life as a teacher, so at age 23 he accepts an invitation from his friend Salvatore Juarez and heads down to Mexico. The plan is to party, fall in love, enjoy the warm weather, and escape Buffalo. But, as Will wryly notes, “No one truly leaves Buffalo.” In the tropical town of Lila, he moves into a scorpion-infested house and immerses himself in the local expatriate scene, which largely comprises students, volcanologists, and an inordinate number of Germans. His life becomes one of nightly parties, awful bars, sketchy street festivals, and massive amounts of alcohol. Will fights through the horrors of his Roman Catholic upbringing to overcome shame and self-doubt, helped by Luz Oscura, a head-turning college student who becomes his girlfriend. With funds running low, Will gets inconsistent work teaching English but still manages to travel, visiting quaint Guanajuato and pricey Puerto Vallarta. Luz, unfazed by his volatile lifestyle and moments of irrationality, plays just enough games to keep the boorish yet insecure Will hot on her trail. Will wants to see Mexico from the inside, and he largely succeeds in experiencing its wonders, though he remains hampered by significant gringo bashing. As he plots a final trip around the country with Luz, he feels his future is more up in the air than ever. LaPoma (Developing Minds, 2015, etc.) obviously knows Mexico well, framing the nation not by its problems but by the hearts of its people. Will is hardly perfect, but his job teaching English to children shows him at his best and most dedicated while also giving insights into the economic issues that plague the country. The numerous party scenes tend to bog down in detail, but the descriptions of Mexican locales are as vibrant, colorful, and illuminating as the novel’s unique characters (“There were great open fields of tall grass with fires burning in the distance, whose flames leapt off the world like brilliant localized solar flares”). The author can write about serious things with humor, and Will’s tale shows an understanding of Mexico that goes beyond the ordinary.
A bit off-kilter as a coming-of-age story, but it succeeds as an account of an American abroad trying to escape—and see beyond—the tourist traps.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9988403-0-7
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Almendro Arts
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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