Bestselling romancer Deveraux (High Tide, 1999, etc.) has a great sense of fun, although the plot of this sexy Highland...
A fiery social activist will do anything to advance the cause of women’s rights . . . but in 1909, she’ll have to do her stepfather’s bidding first.
Temperance O’Neil’s beloved mother has married Angus McCairn, a dour Scotsman, who points out that (1) he now controls all of the family money, and (2) he wants Temperance to behave like a dutiful daughter and stop financing crackpot schemes to teach the prostitutes on the streets of New York more ladylike but less lucrative job skills such as hat-making. Temperance reluctantly agrees, but she balks at Angus’s next request: that she pose as a housekeeper at his ancestral estate, in Edinburgh, in order to somehow force his bachelor nephew James into leaving the old place and marrying. Somebody. Anybody. Angus doesn’t care who it is, but he won’t give the furious Temperance a nickel more unless she complies. So off she goes, grumbling comically all the way to Scotland, and meets James, a gruff but good chip off the McCairn block. Predictable misunderstandings ensue—and Temperance likes housework not at all. But she does like the young and handsome James, who’s struggling to gain control of his own inheritance, starting with finding it. Many a McCairn before him has succumbed to the lure of the gaming tables, and who’s to say where the money is now? Not to mention all those confusing clauses in a tight-fisted relative’s last will and testament that . . . oh, never mind. It’ll all end in a mix-up, with the unmarried Temperance back in New York with a squalling infant McCairn in her arms—but no James.
Bestselling romancer Deveraux (High Tide, 1999, etc.) has a great sense of fun, although the plot of this sexy Highland fling goes everywhichway.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-671-00203-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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