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FAR TO GO

Name: FAR TO GO
Author: Julie Ellis
ISBN: 0-8217-4854-8

by Julie Ellis ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1995

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From the big bestselling author of Lasting Treasures (1993), among many others, a Jewish family saga with a pace like Chinese water torture. A Jewish mother worries for six decades—and with reason. During the Depression, Fran marries Bernie Goldman, an unemployed boy from New York, and wonders how they will get by. Then it's WW II and she worries that Bernie will have to go and fight, so she has two baby girls to keep him on the home front. Then Fran gets shot in the back—while worrying about a Japanese friend—and it's hit-or-miss whether she'll ever walk again. She recovers but Bernie dies an untimely death and Fran returns to her native Georgia to work in her father's store. She builds the store into a successful chain and falls in love with Craig, a nice Jewish widower who takes her to Paris. But she lets him go because her children are growing up, and, boy-oh-boy, is she worried: One daughter leaves law school to marry a failed musician who lets her support him and also do all the housework; the other daughter gives up dreams of journalistic glory to marry a wealthy boy, half Jewish, who is murdered by his brother (that ``Cain and Abel schtik''). Years later, Fran gives Craig up again because she's worried about her grandchildren: A granddaughter has become a Madonna-like singer who doesn't wear a bra and never calls home. Fran's best friend is a gay man named Robin, and when he gets a bad cold...well, we all know what that means: more worrying. A relentlessly linear ``and then'' novel—as in first they ate eye-round; and then they watched television; and then they got a divorce. Disappointingly flat.

Pub Date: March 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-8217-4854-8

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Kensington

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
LASTING TREASURES
by Julie Ellis

- BOOK REVIEW
TRESPASSING HEARTS
by Julie Ellis

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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

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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.