bookshelf

DEGREES OF DIFFICULTY

Name: DEGREES OF DIFFICULTY
Author: Julie E. Justicz
ISBN: 978-1-944388-74-4

by Julie E. Justicz ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2019

A stunning, heartfelt, and poignant debut.

bookshelf

Caring for a profoundly disabled child 24/7 is both exhausting and tension-producing for every member of a family. Worse, the lack of affordable and readily available social supports all too often puts the burden of care on the child’s siblings and parents.

For dad Perry Novotny, a successful Atlanta homebuilder, his wife, Caroline Clissold, a Shakespeare scholar and Emory professor, and their two older kids, Ivy and Hugo, the challenge of rearing their youngest, Ben, a nonverbal boy with an IQ of 32, has left almost everyone frayed and close to despair. But not Hugo. As the oldest son, he seems to enjoy engaging with his kid brother. In fact, Hugo stays by Ben’s side whenever possible, soothing him during and after his near-constant grand mal seizures, interpreting the varying meanings of his sole word, "Guh," and generally keeping him entertained. After Ben is booted from his umpteenth group home—Ben bites, scratches, and hits, unaware of his capacity to cause serious physical injury to others—teenage Hugo makes Ben his project. Others in the family know that this is not a good plan, but, somehow, they allow it to unfold. For their part, Ivy withdraws into schoolwork while Caroline withdraws into scholarly research and soothes her nerves with drugs and alcohol. Perry, meanwhile, tries to keep a smile on his face no matter what. The tensions are palpable, and an inevitable crisis looms over much of the novel. When it occurs, it packs a punch and provides an incandescent spotlight on how few resources exist for families like the Novotny-Clissolds. The novel is heartbreaking and enraging, even chilling, as it exposes, in straightforward and never-maudlin terms, the stresses and strains of providing constant care to someone who will never be independent. Different coping styles are also beautifully explicated, without judgment.

A stunning, heartfelt, and poignant debut.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-944388-74-4

Page Count: 300

Publisher: Fomite

Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- PERSPECTIVES
Beyond the Behemoths: In 2019, Small Presses Are Publishing Some of the Best Fiction Out There

bookshelf

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

bookshelf

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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

- SEEN & HEARD
The Snowy Day Is NYC Library’s Most Popular Book

- SEEN & HEARD
ALA Releases List of 2020’s Most Challenged Books

- SEEN & HEARD
NYT Readers Voting on Best Book of Past 125 Years

bookshelf

LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

bookshelf

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.