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Seeing in the Dark

Name: Seeing in the Dark
Author: Judith Peck
ISBN: 978-1600476426

ARIELLE'S STORY

by Judith Peck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 2, 2012

Arielle’s story will resonate with readers—particularly women of a certain age—eager to will her to leave her bastard...

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A painfully honest, moving family saga—and first novel—by sculptor, professor, and multigenre author Peck (Sculpture as Experience, 2007).

Tracing the relationship of Arielle Fischer and Stuart Brockman from their first meeting in 1968 through courtship, marriage, parenthood and, ultimately, death, Peck offers a candid portrayal of the challenges encountered by a successful professional woman balancing work, marriage and motherhood. Although Arielle’s parents and sister support her juggling act, her husband—struggling with mental health issues and jealousy of her success—and his family seem to only blame Arielle for all that goes wrong, without recognizing all that she does right. Many readers will be baffled by Arielle not heeding her initial impression of Stuart on their disastrous first date. Not only does she continue to see and, eventually, marry the troubled and troubling Stuart, but she remains married to him when most women would have left. Stranger still, she believes she loves him. The disturbing trek through nearly 30 years of the Brockmans’ lives together should be depressing, but Arielle’s eternal optimism (Stuart calls her his “light”) and no-nonsense attitude prevent the book from being too dark. Arielle copes with not only Stuart’s but their children’s bad decisions and the turmoil they create—all of which Stuart blames on Arielle because he apparently had no role in their upbringing. Upsetting subject matter aside, the novel is a touching, no-holds-barred depiction of a dysfunctional family on the brink of brokenness. Peck proves herself to be as much an artist with words as she is with other media. Stuart’s description of Arielle’s luminosity is spot-on, although she reveals a curiously shallow depth of introspection, despite the fact that the book is written in first person. Arielle never really questions her own decisions or shows much pain in the face of the cruelty she suffers at the hands of the others.

Arielle’s story will resonate with readers—particularly women of a certain age—eager to will her to leave her bastard husband.

Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2012

ISBN: 978-1600476426

Page Count: 438

Publisher: Wasteland Press

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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FLY AWAY

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 23, 2013

Unrelenting gloom relieved only occasionally by wrenching trauma; somehow, though, Hannah’s storytelling chops keep the...

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Hannah’s sequel to Firefly Lane (2008) demonstrates that those who ignore family history are often condemned to repeat it.

When we last left Kate and Tully, the best friends portrayed in Firefly Lane, the friendship was on rocky ground. Now Kate has died of cancer, and Tully, whose once-stellar TV talk show career is in free fall, is wracked with guilt over her failure to be there for Kate until her very last days. Kate’s death has cemented the distrust between her husband, Johnny, and daughter Marah, who expresses her grief by cutting herself and dropping out of college to hang out with goth poet Paxton. Told mostly in flashbacks by Tully, Johnny, Marah and Tully’s long-estranged mother, Dorothy, aka Cloud, the story piles up disasters like the derailment of a high-speed train. Increasingly addicted to prescription sedatives and alcohol, Tully crashes her car and now hovers near death, attended by Kate’s spirit, as the other characters gather to see what their shortsightedness has wrought. We learn that Tully had tried to parent Marah after her father no longer could. Her hard-drinking decline was triggered by Johnny’s anger at her for keeping Marah and Paxton’s liaison secret. Johnny realizes that he only exacerbated Marah’s depression by uprooting the family from their Seattle home. Unexpectedly, Cloud, who rebuffed Tully’s every attempt to reconcile, also appears at her daughter’s bedside. Sixty-nine years old and finally sober, Cloud details for the first time the abusive childhood, complete with commitments to mental hospitals and electroshock treatments, that led to her life as a junkie lowlife and punching bag for trailer-trash men. Although powerful, Cloud’s largely peripheral story deflects focus away from the main conflict, as if Hannah was loath to tackle the intractable thicket in which she mired her main characters.

Unrelenting gloom relieved only occasionally by wrenching trauma; somehow, though, Hannah’s storytelling chops keep the pages turning even as readers begin to resent being drawn into this masochistic morass.

Pub Date: April 23, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-312-57721-6

Page Count: 416

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.