Slight and superficial, with no real connection between Ollie and the other characters.
Professional illustrator Twingley’s first novel tells how an aspiring illustrator spends his summer vacation.
As well as providing the striking cover art, the author festoons his story with drawings of his characters; at one point, they fill eight consecutive pages. Angular and idiosyncratic, they form a vivid contrast to Twingley’s bland prose. After his first year in a graduate program at a New York City art school, narrator Ollie Clay returns to his home state of North Dakota to regroup. The small tourist town of Marysville suits him fine. His friend Tank Wilson has a bike shop there. Ollie will help out and escort riders through the Badlands; Tank’s uncle has a vacant trailer where he can stay. Business is so slow that Ollie feels “like a mannequin in a storefront window.” He spends most of his time hanging out at the eponymous Saloon, “the beating heart of Marysville.” An innocent mama’s boy, Ollie experiences his first bender and his first joint while observing the saloon’s regulars. They include Willie Beck, a spastic old guy who’s the life of the party; the 300-pound Big Man, a biker writing a Hemingway-esque novel; an ancient bank clerk in her feather boa…gee, what a crazy bunch! Also hanging around is Lacy, a Native American free spirit and Tank’s on-again, off-again girlfriend with whom, inevitably, Ollie will have his first tryst. So does Ollie come of age? Not quite. He registers the alcoholism of Willie and Tank but doesn’t pursue its meaning. His break with Tank, which leaves him jobless and homeless, goes for nothing, and his slim epiphany that adults don’t know what it all means falls short of an acknowledgement that small-town life has its darker, imprisoning aspects.
Slight and superficial, with no real connection between Ollie and the other characters.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8706-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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