A dynamic, multifaceted treat.
Debut author Morris offers a timely novel about a food safety crisis.
An E. coli outbreak. A product recall. For most people, such events trigger a cursory check of the refrigerator or a doctor’s appointment, at most, but this novel shows how, for those working in the food industry, they’re a storm on the horizon and that even the most basic, everyday choices can dramatically alter fate. Stella Gonzalez, who washes produce for the Green Earth Organics corporation, struggles with the fact that her company fails to provide her with a living wage even after she’s worked there for 15 years to provide for her daughter. Executive Jane Janhusen, meanwhile, loves the company and her position at the right hand of company head Kate Worthington, an organic-food celebrity. But when a food crisis unfolds, saving their reputations and that of the company becomes harder than she could have imagined. On the outside, Ruth Malmquist fears for her son’s life after he’s infected by contaminated spinach. The three women’s conflicting desires intersect and entangle, while Green Earth Organics founder Roger Worthington, Kate’s husband, offers perspective into the gritty details of corporate damage control. The points of view shift and change as the crisis progresses, creating an engaging narrative of personal responsibility. Morris’ writing is strong and incisive, the plot is complex and nuanced, and the attention to detail keeps the story compelling throughout. Specifically, the book conveys a great deal of information about the workings of the agricultural industry, especially for such a slim volume—from executives’ concerns regarding management, public relations, and the possibility of selling the company to the laborers’ thoughts on unionization and how all these factors affect the world at large. What’s more, setting the story in 2008 allows it to address the rise of health food and lifestyle celebrities, local-food movements, the advent of “superfoods,” and even the financial crisis. The novel also tackles difficult issues involving family, grief, and sexual harassment with compassionate tact and multicultural insight.
A dynamic, multifaceted treat.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-6999-7
Page Count: 212
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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