A refreshingly energetic novel featuring lovable heroines.
In Murray’s debut novel, four lesbian friends navigate the romantic landscape of their senior years and support one another through hardships.
A group of women takes a trip to New Orleans, expecting an invigorating weekend of good food and music, and although their ages range from 58 to 69, they all share a passion for life. Dory and Robby have been romantic partners for more than 20 years; the former is spontaneous and sometimes absent-minded while the latter is practical and protective. Charlene is a down-to-earth former judge from humble beginnings who’s now running for State House representative; at the French Quarter Music Festival, a romance blossoms between her and a courteous woman named Lee Childs. Jill Hunt, the youngest and wildest of the group, is a sharp-witted woman with an inheritance who’s currently seeing a much younger woman. However, it soon becomes apparent that the women have secrets involving the success of Dory’s new book, the details of Jill’s money management, and the legitimacy of Charlene’s past employment. As the women face the consequences of deception, betrayal, and blackmail, their bonds become more important than ever. Murray alternates the focus among the four main women, extensively developing each character. Her depictions of their interactions, both platonic and romantic, make for entertaining reading. The romantic moments vary in tone, from the serious, steadfast intimacy of established partners to the infatuation of a casual affair, enlivened by several explicitly erotic scenes. Despite the gravity of the characters’ situations and their resulting emotional lows, the tone of the book is ultimately optimistic. Along the way, the author provides bits of casual wisdom; for instance, in the subplot about Dory’s journey as an author, Murray comments on the difficulties of breaking into publishing. The text is also self-aware of how stories about older lesbians don’t tend to receive a lot of mainstream attention. An older demographic may be this book’s main audience, but it merits consideration by adults of any age.
A refreshingly energetic novel featuring lovable heroines.Pub Date: March 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948232-51-7
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Sapphire Books Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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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