Well-wrought female empowerment tale with a dramatic twist ending.
In this women’s fiction/thriller novel, Myra Benning contends with a cheating husband who may also have sexually abused their teen daughter.
Myra’s professor husband, Derek, has just confirmed her suspicions that he’s been having affairs with his students. In this tense environment, just after son Peter leaves for college, Myra wakes up to her other child Susan’s screams of “Get him off!” Derek says he was comforting the 14-year-old during her nightmare, yet he also oddly remarks how the girl looked “so beautiful, laying there in the moonlight.” Myra asks Derek to leave and brings in the police and a therapist. The latter concludes that Susan is exhibiting characteristics of having been sexually abused, even if there’s no evidence of penetration. Derek then disappears, and the novel jumps 12 years. Susan, now married to a man met in group therapy, has a new baby. Myra has turned her animal illustrations into a successful cartooning career. Then Susan thinks she’s spotted Derek’s car, and Myra senses her house was broken into. Peter, who never believed his father was an abuser, tells Myra that Derek created a new life in a nearby California town. Derek, who still protests his innocence, tells Myra that he retrieved his birth certificate from her house to deal with his family’s legal matters. Informed that Derek’s stoic, also cheated-upon mother, Eleanor, is dying, Myra, now in a relationship with policeman Randy Larson, agrees to a family reunion at Derek’s family home, where Susan recovers a more complete memory of her abuse, prompting a series of tragic yet revelatory events to unfold. Kirscht (The Inheritors, 2012, etc.), a retired university lecturer, brings grace and flair to this third effort. She quickly establishes Myra, a Minnesota native who has always been a bit insecure in the rather enigmatic Derek’s world, as a sympathetic heroine who must now face up to what she may have been enabling in her marriage. Kirscht also plants just enough seeds in her smooth-flowing narrative so that its rather surprising finale doesn’t seem too far out in left field.
Well-wrought female empowerment tale with a dramatic twist ending.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1614690436
Page Count: 264
Publisher: New Libri Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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